Re: [xml-dev] Registration status

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

> David, as the co-author of RFC 3023, I would appreciate if you would
> reread it.  We covered these issues in an extensive mailing list
> archive, but tried to distill them into appendix A.
:-) Yes I will (but I think I'll sleep first, getting late..)


> Now, I agree that compound types cannot be handled ideally by MIME, but
> the MIME concept of dispatching to the correct application is still
> useful.

yes but as I mentioned my comments were mainly addressed at mathml+xml 
(as that was the question that started the thread) given that most
mathml lives inside something else, I do now wonder  whether it's useful
to have any mathml-specific mime type.
The email agent dipatching example does suggest (as someone else
commented) that having xxx+xml based on the document element is useful.
ie xhtml+xml is fine. But that an xhtml+mathml+svg+... document should
just be xhtml+xml rather than worrying too much about compound
documents. If that's the road we take then mathml+xml is a logical thing
to have for those (relatively few) standalone mathml documents, and it
probably should be registered anyway, as having examples based on
unregistered types is just confusing in the long run.

Somehow it just feels wrong. I think it's the idea of registration,
given that XML in general and namespaces in particular are expressly
designed to allow you to design your own languages without needing to
refer to any central authority, the idea of having to register
things with anyone (even the good guys in the ietf:-) seems very
unnatural. Of course this is really a matter of perception rather than
substance. Whilst I can invent a new language in my own namespace 
and not tell anyone about it, there's not a lot of point unless I only
talk to myself..

David


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