- From: Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:22:30 +0100
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- CC: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, "www-tag@w3.org List" <www-tag@w3.org>
On 22/02/2013 08:22 , Larry Masinter wrote: > Perhaps the TAG finding on "Authoritative metadata" needs to be > re-reviewed and made into a consensus Req (and sniffing between > XHTML and HTML disallowed). I would support the TAG revisiting the topic of Authoritative Metadata, but with a view on pointing out that it is an architectural antipattern. Information that is essential and authoritative about the processing of a payload should be part of the payload and not external to it. Anything else is brittle and leads to breakage. The sniffing behaviour is a consequence of media types as an architectural construct, not an alternative to it. (I say "should", not "must", because in situations in which both end points can agree upon a vocabulary then they can exchange information more efficiently by dropping essential data.) Further, I think that the TAG should take this occasion to issue a recommendation to people building formats that they include format identifying information as essential, typically with a magic number, first non-blank line, etc. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
Received on Friday, 22 February 2013 09:22:37 UTC