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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Notations and MIME types
W. Eliot Kimber scripsit:
> Unless I've misunderstood something, a MIME type is still an indirection to
> the definition of that MIME type. I.e., "text/xml" is a pointer to the RFC
> that establishes that MIME type.
That's true, but it's not a *flexible* pointer. Neither you nor IETF
is free to change the binding of "text/xml"; if XML changes, a new
MIME type (which includes the parameters as well as the type/subtype
information) must be registered.
MIME parameters, BTW, are essentially a method of registering related
MIME types en masse: e.g. registering "text/plain" with a "charset"
parameter essentially registers "text/plain;charset=us-ascii",
"text/plain;charset=utf-8" and so on for all the charsets in the
charset registry.
> But then a problem is: where do I go to
> figure out what RFC a given MIME type maps to?
IANA keeps that information in the MIME-type registry.
> What if the MIME type is an
> "x-*" MIME type, what do I do then?
Nothing. This is the moral equivalent of a notation with a
"file://" system identifier.
> Note that the external ID for a
> notation could, in theory be a MIME type:
>
> <!NOTATION xml SYSTEM "urn:mime:text/xml" >
Indeed.
> It's clear that I need to write a paper
> clearly outlining what notations are for and how they are best put to use.
Exactly.
> Perhaps part of the problem is that in the Web world we have tended to
> remove the need for such a generalized mechanism by hard-coding knowledge
> of the semantics of everything? But you can't do that forever, and MIME
> only seems to make the problem worse
Not worse, perhaps not sufficiently better.
> by requiring that all interchangable
> types be registered before they can be used. Notations don't require that
> because the external ID of a notation can be anything (including MIME types
> or their RFC documents).
One advantage of MIME types over notations is that they contain
declarative information. Unless your program is AI-complete, the
only thing you can do with the external ID of a notation is try to
use a local table ("mailcap", the Win32 registry) to find an engine
to process the data, and communications with that engine are crude:
you typically can only request it to render the data in some default
manner.
A MIME-aware system can take more intelligent action even if it does
not have a local resource for processing a specific MIME type, due
to the structuring provided by MIME-type syntax. A MIME object of
type "text/plain;charset="8859-8-e" can be rendered as ASCII
plain text, with loss of information, even if the charset
"8859-5-e" is unknown locally. A corresponding notation N1 defined
by the external ID "urn:rfc:rfc1555#8859-5-e" leaves a similarly
equipped notation-aware processor completely clueless.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@c...
You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn.
You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn.
Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)
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