- From: Mark Nottingham <mark.nottingham@bea.com>
- Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 14:31:12 -0700
- To: "Amy Lewis" <alewis@tibco.com>
- Cc: xml-dist-app@w3.org
On Monday, August 4, 2003, at 08:11 AM, Amy Lewis wrote:
>
> Unless the working group/task force has reason to believe that the IANA
> is going to change its long-standing policy of conservatism in the
> approval of new types, this statement is not quite correct.
>
> One new type has been added since the publication of the four MIME RFCs
> ("model"). There is good reason to suggest that an enumeration of
> types
> is preferable to an open content model: what are you going to do with a
> type you don't recognize? The reluctance of IANA to approve new types
> is another factor, as is the reasoning behind it: new types are avoided
> because they require changes to deployed software.
Hi Amy,
While new top-level media types aren't added often, there is an
extensibility point for them in the 'x-' convention. Enumerating them
won't really improve interoperability, as many implementations won't
recognize subtypes, and will require us to revise the specification
each time a major type is added.
> So, I would think that it would be better to enumerate, with an escape
> to vendor-defined or random types. But the enumeration is valuable,
> signalling the set of types that processors should (in some fashion)
> support.
What does it mean for a processor to support a type? The typing is
useful to the application, not the SOAP stack, in MTOM.
Cheers,
Received on Monday, 4 August 2003 17:31:17 UTC