- From: Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com>
- Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:49:23 -0700
- To: Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org>
- CC: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, www-rdf-comments@w3.org
When I originally saw that TBL had recommended text/rdf+n3 as the N3 MIME type, I was surprised. JSON uses application/json [RFC 4627]. XHTML uses application/xhtml+xml [RFC 3236]. text/javascript and text/ecmascript are now marked "obsolete" in favor of application/javascript and application/ecmascript, respectively, noting that, "The use of the 'text' top-level type for this type of content is known to be problematic." [RFC 4329] Looking further on the web, it appears that one of the major concerns is that the character set for "text" content types would default to US_ASCII during HTTP content type negotiation if no "charset" parameter were supplied. However, I read RFC 2046 to say that this only applies to text/plain, and that any future "text" subtypes may specify default character sets other than US_ASCII. But how this is handled in the wild by browsers, I don't know. Whatever the case, there seems to be a trend away from "text" content types (for anything other than text/plain, it seems, which makes me question the usefulness of the entire "text" top-level type, but that's another issue). Are these fears warranted, and should text/* be abandoned in favor of application/*, as Graham suggests? Or will using text/* allow browsers to display the N3 (which seems useful to me) if there is no plugin for N3? Garret Graham Klyne wrote: > 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 >> >> > >
Received on Saturday, 3 November 2007 17:50:39 UTC