Ned and I have completed work on a major revision of the draft RFC. The
result is an RFC that is much more polished and much closer to being
"finished" (whatever that means). In my next two messages, I will be
posting it to the list. I will post it in two forms, a plain-text
version and a PostScript version. I encourage you to print it on paper,
as the PostScript version is eminently more readable.
In this draft, we have taken the attitude of pretending, at least, to
give definitive answers to all questions. Gone is the hemming and
hawing of previous versions. In its place is a document that pretends,
at least, to know what it is talking about. In some cases, it probably
doesn't. Please don't interpret the firmer tone of this document as an
implication that anything is set in stone; it is intended only to
reflect our hope that most of the document, at least, is firmer than it
used to be.
Finally, I'd like to suggest a convention for structuring our comments
about this document. Instead of just sending all your mail as "Re: The
New Draft" or something like that, how about trying to put the section
number into your Subject header? Thus, a comment on section 3.1 might
have
Subject: 3.1: Style #2 stinks
or
Subject: Appendix A: You must be kidding
This might make it easier for casual readers of this list to focus on
topics of interest to them. If you have comments on several sections,
and it isn't too much trouble, you might think about breaking them up
into several messages. (I'm inevitably going to read them all, so it
really doesn't matter to me, but I know that some readers of this list
have considerably more specialized interests, and this convention would
be kinder to them.)
I'd like to particularly draw peoples' attention to Section 2, which
defines a LOT of new Content-types that have never been defined before.
Some of these were defined with only minimal help from experts in the
field, and could doubtless benefit enormously from further scrutiny.
Also, please note that five of the references are not yet fleshed out.
I think I'll be able to handle them, but didn't want to delay the draft
just to complete a few references.
The draft RFC will follow shortly. Fire away! -- Nathaniel