Hi Keith, On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 12:41:33PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
- it's a better form of x/vnd/prs tree, especially when combined with my proposed URI extension
How does making it easier to create new types equate to "better"?
It only necessarily makes it easier by avoiding registration, but I believe that your concern is with the implicit avoidance of the review process. I think you can have the best of both worlds by revising Mark's draft to have more draft-freed-mime-p4 -like semantics. Something like; 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?
- 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.
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.
I expect that I disagree with MarkN on this too; I don't think that the use of XML necessarily requires a multitude of media types (and I'm not talking about using "application/xml" for everything). Personally, my money's on description frameworks like RDF to moderate the need for new media types.
Mumble. Multi-layer dispatching seems like something to avoid; or at least, to be wary of.
It's not multi-layer; the URI and the media type remain the only dispatch points for requests. They're just dispatching a very generic application.
AFAIK, it's the only universally deployed means of mapping strings to authorities on the Internet.
In fact, that's not what DNS is. It's a protocol for finding the network addresses associated with hosts and services.
Sure, but as a consequence of doing that, it also provides the string to authority mapping. Mark. -- Mark Baker. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. http://www.markbaker.ca