RE: ACTION-680: Jeni to lead TAG telcon review of http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-media-type-regs

There were a few content items that I had hoped MIME registration draft update would take on, but it has not. I raised these in the much earlier "mime-web-info" draft, but the only feedback I got from the media-type-regs editors was that my document was "not helpful".    If the TAG has been successful in articulating issues in a way that they get some attention, perhaps we could also talk about:

File extensions:
   File extensions are part of the web. They're not part of http (because the trailing end of the URL could be anything), but they're part of "ftp:", they're also part of shared file storage systems like DropBox and Google Drive as well as older file sharing systems like NFS. They're relevant to HTTP and HTML:  The HTML working group added a feature in file upload dialog boxes to ask for file extensions, for example.  (Should we look at webarch and shared drive systems?)

The MIME registry includes a place to list "file extensions", but there are no good practices listed for choosing file extensions or using them, and the registry doesn't "match reality".

Magic Numbers:

The MIME registry includes a "magic number" section without a lot of guidance to put in it. The current registry doesn't match what systems use (for detecting fingerprints), the (inactive) MIME sniffing document contains its own table of magic numbers.  Again, I'm not sure what shared cloud storage drives do with file extensions or conversions.

If we're looking for previous TAG findings that the community doesn't seem to pay much attention to, the "Authoritative Metadata" finding comes to mind.

Internet Media Type parameters:

Many W3C (and IETF) working groups struggle with "parameters" for Internet Media Types. The media type registration draft doesn't give much advice about when to define parameters, and the tradeoff -- media type parameters are often lost when content is stored in a file system.

Received on Wednesday, 25 April 2012 14:58:38 UTC