Re: Does it matter? (was Re: .rdf file extension security?)

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 09:31:56 -0000, Phil Archer <phil.archer@icra.org>  
wrote:

> Whilst it is easy for a professional to add a MIME type to a server, for  
> hobby webmasters (and, let's be honest, a lot of "professional web  
> designers") this is well beyond what can be expected..

Well, I do think it is important that a minimal amount of learning be  
suggested. Just like explaining why it is important to provide information  
about content in the first place, explaining how to get this right is  
probably a valuable investment in smarter use of the web.

> So, the question is, does it make a practical difference if an RDF/XML  
> instance is in a file with a .xml extension and a MIME type of  
> application/xml, rather that nicely in a file with a .rdf extension and  
> a MIME type of application.rdf+xml?

Well, it depends on lots of things. application/xml is just generic,  
almost as bad as the octet-stream that lots of servers seem to think might  
be useful information (it isn't. It is equivalent to saying "no idea - you  
figure it out").

In a case where an application has a link to a particular file (resource)  
and expects to process it in a certain way, so long as there is nothing  
saying it can't be processed like that there should be no problem.  
application/xml doesn't say whether something is RDF or not, but there  
seems no reason not to look and see if you expect that something is RDF.

But I think best practice would most certainly be to configure servers  
properly - it really isn't very difficult if people know what to do or ask  
for.

I hope that is helpful...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile - Vice Presidente - Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org                      http://www.sidar.org
     (chaals is available for consulting at the moment)

Received on Thursday, 3 February 2005 15:12:32 UTC