Re: draft finding on Authoritative Metadata

This is wonderful, Roy.  Much improved.

Some comments ...

In the status section there are links to related TAG issues, but
RFC3023Charset-21[1] (and the related finding[2]) isn't there despite
being implicitly referenced from section 7.

Section 3.2 says;

"A message containing the header field Content-Type: text/html would
indicate that standard HTML processing is desired, whereas the header
field Content-Type: text/plain would indicate that the data should be
viewed as plain text without HTML rendering."

Two comments on that.  First is that the second part of that sentence
seems to suggest an interpretation counter to what's recommended
earlier in the finding; that a Content-Type of "text/plain" means
"viewed as plain text without HTML rendering", rather than
"interpreted as a plain text document rather than an HTML document".

The other comment is just to say that there are a couple of other
examples that might also warrant mention here.  The first is that
there are XML documents which are both valid XHTML documents and XSLT
stylesheets[3].  The second is the same issue for arbitrary XML
documents and RDF/XML documents[4].  Though HTML and plain text make
for a simple, broadly applicable example, my experience is that these
other examples do a much better job at explaining the problem ... at
least to those familiar with XML.

Cheers,

 [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#RFC3023Charset-21
 [2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2002/0129-mime
 [3] http://www.markbaker.ca/Talks/2004-media-types-and-compdocs/slide4-0.html
 [4] http://www.markbaker.ca/Talks/2004-xmlself/slide24-0.html

Mark.

On 12/5/05, Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com> wrote:
>
> I have updated the finding on Authoritative Metadata
>
>      http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect

--
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.       http://www.markbaker.ca
Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies  http://www.coactus.com

Received on Monday, 5 December 2005 16:27:49 UTC