Re: Proposed TAG Finding: Internet Media Type registration, consistency of use

On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 20:35, Tim Bray wrote:
> Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> 
> > 2) I worry about the link to RFC 3023 over time.  If RFC 3023 has
> > successors, will that require a new publication of this document?  This
> > document is in large part a reference to that RFC.
> 
> What's a good way to address this?

I'm not sure, especially since we haven't formally begun a revision
process.  I'm not sure that the changes will be that large - if
anything, I hope the document would shrink a bit - but there is at least
a significant possibility of change within two years.

(I would prefer to avoid a repeat of the battles over XML 1.1, though I
don't think any likely change to RFC 3023 would have nearly the
ramifications of the Unicode/XML interactions.)

> > 3) It might be worth taking the opportunity to get rid of the text/
> > mess.  The discussion of misleading charset information might be a very
> > good place to do that.
> 
> I think I agree with what you're proposing, but let's be sure... are you 
> talking about rev-ing 3023 to discourage text/xml?  -Tim

I think the charset issues already effectively discourage the use of
text/*, but the specification still supports it.  I'm not sure there's
consensus to remove it entirely, but it's probably the ugliest set of
issues in the spec.

Whether or not the RFC addresses that directly, the W3C might want to
avoid the text/* issues in its own usage.  I worry that recommending
such a change is opening a barrel of worms, but the text/* issues are
already pretty wormy.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com

Received on Wednesday, 22 May 2002 09:54:34 UTC