RE: ACTION-472: New Mime-web-info draft

I don't see how using a URI instead of media type name of the
form  x/y (text/html or image/svg+xml or whatever) helps solve
any problem at all.

How is the world any different if everyone uses

http://media-type-registry.w3.org/text/html


instead of 

text/html

except that web protocols need to send more bytes around?

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net


-----Original Message-----
From: Eric J. Bowman [mailto:eric@bisonsystems.net] 
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 12:54 PM
To: nathan@webr3.org
Cc: ashok.malhotra@oracle.com; Jonathan Rees; Larry Masinter; Yves Lafon; Noah Mendelsohn; www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: ACTION-472: New Mime-web-info draft

Nathan wrote:
> 
> Aye, and I guess classing some URIs as "media types" based on the 
> first x chars of the lexical form of the URI would not be a good idea 
> (Opacity and all).
> 

It's a fine debate to have on rest-discuss, where we can talk about the
various philosophies of how self-descriptive messaging might function,
without limiting ourselves to the constraints imposed by HTTP.  The
HTTP WG would be the right forum to suggest, in the absence of a
Content-Type header, falling back to some other header which allows
URIs as tokens -- without having anything to do with media types.  Here,
though, we should treat decisions like the registry being targeted at
humans or not being URI-extensible (or existing at all), as having
already been made, IMO.

-Eric