
Le 05-avr.-09 à 23:13, Mark Baker a écrit :
We call them media types now 8-)
noted (changed subject also).
Here are my questions: - do you see any danger in having three mime-types if we have the provision above?
I wouldn't use the word "danger", but I personally don't see much value in having three media types based on your explanation and the spec itself. The only reason I could see for needing another one (not necessarily two more) would be if there were agents which would only be implementing one of the two forms of MathML document and, most importantly, were unable to understand documents which contained the form they didn't implement. But that doesn' t appear to be the case.
Martin J. Dürst replied:
I agree with what Mark said.
Sure, that's the question and sure there are such agents even though nowadays they mostly do both. For example giving only presentation into Maple works "often" (in an anglo-saxon world) but often interpretes wrong (e.g. with a limit). The conversions are ready, they're just impossible to do fully. The same would happen at the http level. Most tools can process all the three forms (they're all MathML after all) but they would process far better and fail less if they would know the specific types. Martin J. Dürst also wrote:
I guess you want multiple clipboard types because you want to give the receiving application a chance to use either of the two representations. For media types, that would correspond to the situation that you want your user agent to tell you which representation it prefers, and the server to send one or the other depending on the request from the user agent.
I think this is the very best explanation I can see for the case of content-negotiation for http: give a chance to the client to indicate its preference and to the server to actually be able to do the effort of the conversion better than "just doing it generic". One of the other example would be a component displaying a formula that would use the same URL as a content consumer (a function plotter for example) but interested to display that formula to clients in their own language (or context of notation).
- is there a chance our registration for three mime-types is rejected for other reasons?
The use of "+" is incorrect in a couple of ways. First, that the convention is used to indicate the possibility of generic processing by indication of a generic format, such as XML or JSON; "mathml" isn't such a generic format.
My feeling was different: mathml+xml definitely tasted generic enough to what it names. But if you say so, we can certainly change the first +s to -! Nothing's fixed here. paul