Re: N-Triples MIME type should not be text/plain -- comment on RDF Test Cases.

Two comments, agreeing text/plain is not ideal...

1. My recollection of the IETF discussions around introducing the +xml
convention for MIME content types were focused on applications that might
recognize the suffix and be able to pass the content to some application that
could exploit the common framework of XML.  I don't think that applies here.

2. The intent of text/... is that the content can be displayed to human readers
on text display devices and still be reasonably easy to interpret.  It has been
commented that, for example, HTML fails on this score, and application/ would be
a better choice.

Which considerations suggest to me application/n3 as an appropriate MIME content
type.

#g
--

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> 
> Comment on "RDF Test Cases".
> W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004
>  In http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-testcases/#ntriples it says,
> 
> The Internet media type / MIME type of N-Triples is text/plain and the
> character encoding is 7-bit US-ASCII.
> 
> This is a bug, I think.   It  prevents crawlers from absorbing the file
> and indexing it proerly, it will prevent the file from being dispatched
> inside a data browser to a data-handling view, and so on.
> 
> I would suggest   text/rdf+n3   if the assumption is correct that
> NTriples is a subset of N3.
> Otherwise I suppose text/rdf+nt or something would be logical. Anotehr
> possibility would be
> text/rdf=n3; level=nt
> introducing a level parameter to explain what level of N3 was being used.
> 
> Tim BL
> 

-- 
Graham Klyne
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Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 21:34:14 UTC