* Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org> [2007-12-19 16:10+0000]
I've not read the latest emergence of this thread with a fine tooth comb, but I would suggest:
(1) use application/(something) rather than text/(something) in *all* cases where the content is not primarily for human consumption - i.e. if you expect to do anything other than display as-is on a character display.
By that metric, I agree that they should be application/ , but I'm not confident that said metric is consistent with the rest of the text/ mime tree. Anyone else care to back up or contradict one or both of us?
I don't think that *any* rendering of RDF is really primarily constructed for direct human interpretation.
Oh pshaw. RDF is meant for babies and grandmothers alike; and its text formats read like a romance novel, only less racey.
(2) rather than use the +suffix for cases other than +xml, use -suffix. Or, at least, provide a compelling example of two different media types with +foo suffix that might fall back to being processed by a common software package associated with that suffix.
Thus: application/rdf+xml application/octet-stream (ntriples) application/rdf-turtle application/rdf-n3
Ahh, cool. Could you tell me what are the semantics of foo-bar? I know only octet-stream, and never considered separating the words before.
#g --
Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
[resent, correcting typos and thinkos]
Hi all, there are a couple languages that have been used for a while, turtle and n3, and I am trying work out the right media types to register for them.
== Cast of Characters ╔══════════╦══════════════════════════════╦══════════════════════╗ ║ name ║ role ║ current media type ║ ╠══════════╤══════════════════════════════╤══════════════════════╣ ║ RDF │ data model │ N/A ║ ╟──────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────╢ ║ RDFXML │ XML serialization of RDF │ application/rdf+xml ║ ╟──────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────╢ ║ ntriples │ simple serialization of RDF │ text/plain ║ ╟──────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────╢ ║ turtle │ textual serialization of RDF │ application/x-turtle ║ ╟──────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────╢ ║ n3 │ extension¹of turtle language │ text/rdf+n3 (not ║ ║ │ expressing a superset of RDF │ registered) ║ ╚══════════╧══════════════════════════════╧══════════════════════╝
¹ The origins of turtle and n3 are complicated, but this is the most practical model for media type consideration.
These languages will be published under http://www.w3.org/TR/ (which implies certain persistance and update policy) as soon as I work out what to include in the media type registration. In the mean time, see http://www.dajobe.org/2004/01/turtle/#sec-mime http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3
Neither the turtle nor n3 media types are registered. I seek advice from the community on exactly how to register them, as I will have to beat out some sort of consensus in order to register them.
== Issues • subsumption relationshop — n3 subsumes turtle in both data model and grammar. To that end, text/n3; and text/n3; profile=turtle have been suggested. Another suggestion has been text/rdf+n3 and text/rdf+turtle , in somewhat the spirit of XML (where the +xml indecates the that it's the XML encoding of the preceding datatype).
• subtree — turtle and n3 are certainly more human-readable than ntriples (as they are basically extensions of ntriples, with namespace prefixes and abbreviations for some atoms). The default character encoding of us-ascii is certainly outdated, and doesn't make sense for any of these languages. Garret Wilson (Cc'd) raised the question of whether a text/ registration may force the charset to be, say, utf-8². Both n3 and turtle, as well as related langs like SPARQL, are explcitly utf-8. Can the registration include text like "The encoding is always UTF-8"? Would that mean that the media type would not need a constant charset parameter?
² http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2007OctDec/0017
== Strawman Let me propose: n3: text/rdf+n3 turtle: text/rdf+turtle with [[ Encoding considerations: The encoding is always UTF-8 ]] and the expectation that [[ Content-type: text/rdf+n3 ]] (or +turtle) fully specifies the media type and the character encoding.
A plea to all: bear in mind that this consensus bit is a hard job, and that the world will be much better off if we can reach a timely compromise. We've suffered for five years without these media types so let's keep our mission reallistic.
-- Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
-- -eric office: +1.617.258.5741 NE43-344, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02144 USA mobile: +1.617.599.3509 (eric@w3.org) Feel free to forward this message to any list for any purpose other than email address distribution.