- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 13:58:28 -0000
- To: <www-tag@w3.org>
A new Internet Draft has been published that is relevant to the uriMediaType-9 TAG issue, and vaguely relevant to the "HTTP range" debate/issue (yet to be assigned an issue identifier). http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-palmer-resrep-type-00.t xt - Resource and Representation Typing in HTTP [1] Sean B. Palmer, March 2001, Internet-Draft (work in progress) It specifies two new HTTP headers: "Resource-Type" and "Representation-Type". Representation-Type allows people to type a document using a URI rather than just a MIME type, stopping centralization around the IANA. In fact, the proposal in its current state allows for multiple representation types to be given, possibly along with a content type. Note that the wording in the draft strongly implies that HTTP URIs can identify any resource given the definition in the RFC 2396. This implication is, in my view, appropriate for the draft since it gives one the ability - via. an authoritative method - to give the type of any resource that is identified with an HTTP URI; I would like to state explicitly that the value is not semantically limited, pending a TAG decision on the range-of-HTTP issue. In fact, the current wording is technically not incompatible with the view that HTTP URIs can only identify generic documents. I note that the draft findings for the uriMediaType-9 issue contain the following line:- [[[ the W3C TAG would prefer that MIME media-types map into the HTTP URI scheme with some well-known base URI ]]] - http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2002/01-uriMediaType-9 Personally, I don't agree with that finding; it completely ignores the fact that other schemes are dereferencable (which, is my objection to HTTP-deification). It should at least defer to the "is HTTP special?" issue raised on www-tag. In any case, the res. and rep. type header values are defined as being any URI-view (URI, or absolute URI with fragment), and therefore include non-HTTP schemes. Note that the main purpose for the draft was to provide the "Resource-Type" header; "Representation-Type" was added mainly as an afterthought. [1] N.B. The present version is archived at <http://web.archive.org/web/20020327053715/http://www.ietf.org/in ternet-drafts/draft-palmer-resrep-type-00.txt>. -- Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer @prefix : <http://purl.org/net/swn#> . :Sean :homepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .
Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2002 08:59:03 UTC