While public exposure and review of media types using the DNS tree is not required, using the ietf-types@iana.org mailing list for review is strongly encouraged to improve the quality of those specifications.
Would that address your concern?
not really. I have yet to see why using DNS names, or the DNS itself, for type registration is a good idea.
I've been following this discussion for a while now, and while it pains me to object to something that would lessen my own workload, I find that I have to agree with Keith about this. The stability problems associated with DNS names are just too great.
- it enables new authorities to establish their own review policies over their part of the media tree namespace
This is NOT inherently a good thing. There aren't many restrictions in the current IETF policy, and relaxing these few restrictions is probably not in the best interests of the network. Sure enough, some other organizations would also do due diligence in reviewing new types; some would do a better job than IETF. But encouraging anybody with a domain name to register new types will certainly result in less review overall.
After thinking about it some more, I'd like to retract my previous claim; the DNS tree does not enable this, because it's *already* enabled. Consider the WAPforum and some of their media types such as vnd.wap-wbxml, vnd-wap-wmlc, and vnd.wap.wmlscriptc. These were all run through the WAPforum and its processes. They were also reviewed by the IETF as part of the registration procedure.
additional review is of course not the same thing as circumventing IETF review.
Right. The WAP forum went through the process and registered their types. The requirements the process imposed were minimal, but not nonexistant.
You're talking about the DNS namespace as a whole; I'm talking about individual DNS names. I agree that there will be tremendous pressure to maintain the DNS name space even if (say) the DNS protocol changes. But we've seen numerous examples where DNS names were allowed to expire and were then reassigned; we've also seen a few examples where DNS names were taken away from their original owners and reassigned for apparently arbitrary reasons.
Yep. Nothing's perfect. If you can do any better while permitting decentralized dereferencing, I'm all ears.
that's the problem in a nutshell - it's not clear to me that "decentralized dereferencing" (much less "decentralized review" or "decentralized assignment") is a good idea.
Exactly. Given the huge amount of damage that's been inflicted on the world by badly designed media types, I am forced to see further reduction of the barriers as a reckless step in the wrong direction. Ned