Re: Draft of TAG position on use of unregistered media types in W3C Recommendations

I think the text I drafted accurately captured the direction tentatively 
signaled on the TAG telcon of 18 July 2006, at which the action was 
assigned to me.  You weren't on that call, so it seems that we might want 
to have a bit more discussion, and if necessary redraft accordingly.  Not 
a problem from my point of view.

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
07/21/2006 01:36 PM
 
        To:     noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com
        cc:     www-tag@w3.org, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
        Subject:        Re: Draft of TAG position on use of unregistered 
media types in W3C   Recommendations


On Jul 21, 2006, at 12:07 PM, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:
> Bjoern Hoehrmann writes:
> > How about this instead:
>  >
>  >   W3C Working Groups must resolve dependencies on unregistered 
> Internet
>  >   Media Types by directly or indirectly registering these types in 
> the
>  >   IANA media type registry. W3C Technical Reports must not 
> encourage or
>  >   require use or implementation of unregistered media types.

Works for me.

>  > How is Web architecture positively affected by following your 
> policy in-
>  > stead of mine? 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2006Jul/0009
>  > discusses how interoperability is negatively affected by your 
> policy.
>
> First of all, thank you for the quick response and the suggestion.
>
> As to the substance, we were contacted in part because particular 
> workgroups were concerned because of a desire to reference particular 
> widely deployed types such as "audio/wav".  While I personally have 
> almost no direct familiarity with the history of debates on this media 
> type, my understanding is that various groups have been involved over 
> the years in so far unsuccessful attempts to register that type.

The registered name seems to be
    audio/vnd.wave;codec=1
per
   http://www.iana.org/assignments/wave-avi-codec-registry
and
   http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2361.txt June 1998

>  So, for good or bad reasons it is in fact both unregistered and in 
> widespread use.  I think that your proposed text would essentially 
> require any W3C group that wanted to produce a Recommendation that 
> exploited such a type to be proactive in reopening debate in IANA (or 
> other appropriate registration body) to get it registered.

Yes, exactly.

>   Speaking for myself and not necessarily for the TAG as a whole, I 
> don't think we should require that in the case where the type is 
> already in widespread use, and where the workgroup in question is just 
> another user.   I believe that the sense of the TAG was to allow some 
> latitude in such cases, and I have tried to capture that in the note.

There's always a certain amount of latitude in the W3C process; I don't 
see much reason to put the latitude into the rules. The rule should be: 
you must get all the relevant media types registered.

By analogy, occasionally people hypothesize namespace names of the form 
http://www.w3.org/xyz
when W3C hasn't issued any namespace nor document called /xyz . I 
haven't seen any of them
in widespread use, but suppose they did... if the IETF had a rule
that using such URIs in IETF specs was OK, I'd be pretty annoyed.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/