Re: Revisiting Authoritative Metadata (was: The failure of Appendix C as a transition technique)

On 2013/02/22 18:22, Robin Berjon wrote:
> 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.

In that scenario, how would you get a browser to display any format with 
such a magic number,... as plain text? Many formats, HTML and XHTML 
included, are at the same time plain text.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Friday, 22 February 2013 09:30:15 UTC