At 11:40 11.03.00 -0800, ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com wrote:
And the answer is that we need to define a rule, probably as part of the
current proposal. It can be any of:
(1) Any additional things of this sort are always added after the -xml, and
there's a clear ordering to them.
(2) Any additional things of this sort are always added before the -xml, and
there's a clear ordering to them.
(3) Any additional things of this sort can be added before or after the -xml,
but for any given type there is one and only one valid ordering.
I don't much care which of these we pick. In fact we actually don't even need
to have a rule now, but if we ever added another of these in the future
we'd be forced to use rule (2) at that point, since anything else would not be
backwards compatible.
Seems to me that we could formulate this thing in the negative, rather than
positive; forbid things that could cause confusion, rather than say that
things should be a certain way:
"It is NOT allowed to register content-types that end in -XML when that
content-type is not parseable according to the XML standard, version
<insert appropriate number>".
This is enough to ascertain that if you hand *-XML to an XML parser, that
parser will either grok it or be right in signalling an error, without
saying that (for instance) application/iotp has to be application/iotp-XML,
if the people defining it want it that way.
To allow us to postpone the choice between Ned's three rules above, we
could outlaw anything that matches '-XML-' too, for any purpose until
further notice.
Then we can cross the next bridge when we come to it - and hope it's
another 10 years until we need it. (Has it really been that long? how time
flies....)
Harald A
--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald(_dot_)Alvestrand(_at_)edb(_dot_)maxware(_dot_)no