--On Friday, April 21, 2000 17:53 -0400 Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
wrote:
caveats: (1) it should be up to the folks defining the type to
decide whether to use the -xml frob or not.
concur.
(2) the interaction
between the treatment of this frob and the rules about default
handling of mime objects for user agents presenting those objects
need to be clarified.
The MIME default handling should happen if a handler is set. For example,
I'd consider it much more useful to hand a "video/vnd.foobar.vector-xml" to
the "video/*" handler rather than an XML editor. The only debatable case
is "text/*", but that's only because we broke the usefulness of default
handing for "text/*" when we registered text/html and similar things which
are rarely useful as plain text.
(3) we need to understand how multiple frobs
in the same content-type name work in case we ever need them. *
I'd look for "frob" handlers from right to left.
(4) since "-" is already used in some content-types it might be
worth considering a different separator.
Can't be a tspecial:
tspecials := "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@" /
"," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <">
"/" / "[" / "]" / "?" / "="
I don't think "." would work since it's already used as an additional
hierarchy delimiter. I wouldn't choose "*" due to the common wildcard
meaning, or "-"/"_" since they're common word separators and easily
confused. And I'd avoid %, ', `, # and & since they are frequently used
for quoting or comments.
That leaves: ~!$^+{}|
I note that "-" is used heavily in the current registry. "$" and "_" are
used once each. The others are unused.
- Chris