On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Ben Kovitz wrote:
Some of the docs I found for XML MIME media types seemed to do little more than list the name of the type and who submitted it.
This is indeed the case. However: these exist for historical reasons, and also because the responsible people are very pragmatic about things. When the IESG decides whether to pass the RFC or not, they will get back to you and ask you to produce an RFC that describes the content of this transport type (they did with me). Thus the lengthy documents refered (inaccessible to me right now) should preferabley reside with some standards body, IETF RFCs are preferred, W3.org documents come next, IEEE standards have been referred (e.g. audio/mpeg etc.) I believe the reason as to why a standards body, and IETF in particular, should be used as a storage holder for the standard spec is that it should be easily and readily accessible by any contemporary AND FUTURE implementors of this standard. Compared to IETF, the current storage of the specification (Sourceforge in your case) is rather new and not generally known as an eternal document store. (My inability to obtain it right now is an indication of its reliability.) This means e.g. URI:s referenced in your transport type could change and at a future date complicate the process of retrieveal for an external party, and the IETF cannot guarantee access to these vital documents, which is bad. If you do not want to submit the entire specification to the IETF as an RFC, prs.-types or vnd.-types should be used instead. If you can argue well for you case, then I believe eventually the IESG will make an exception, but this may take a considerable amount of time. Most of this stems from personal experiences and opinions, so take it simply as a piece of anecdotal knowledge, other people here will probably amend and correct me extensively. Linus