On Wed February 9 2005 16:46, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
* Bruce Lilly wrote:
You might say something like "there exist some non-MIME-compliant applications that generate unregistered, non-private-use labels such as 'text/javascript' ... such use is clearly not interoperable".
Would such a statement address your concerns in this regard, or do you mean wording such as "support" as you've mentioned, "the media type application/ecmascript", etc. should still be replaced even if I adopt this proposal?
My principal objection is to inappropriate use of text (image, video, audio, model) discrete types. I have no objection to registration under the application discrete media type. For that matter, there are a number of scripting languages that have no registered media tags ((Bourne) shell (and descendants), awk, sed, perl, python, etc.), and all of them share certain similarities which are distinct from the bulk of application types (which are primarily data used by some software, as opposed to *being* software); there might well be a rare opportunity to register a media type category for scripting [I am not officially proposing that; I mention it only for the sake of completeness].
But why does that require the reference to be normative rather than informative?
A rule of thumb is that if a reference's relevant content were to change, and that would result in some change to an implementation of a media type handler, then that reference is almost certainly normative. If the reference is solely for illustrative purposes, it is informative.