At 11:27 AM 5/7/99 -0700, Larry Masinter wrote:
Different applications will need different categorizations of information,
and attempts to put too many application-specific parameters into the
MIME type will result in granularities of descriptions that may support
some applications and interfere with others.
I'd appreciate an explanation of why a top-level xml type would interfere
with applications. Perhaps some were built with no fallback capabilities
for unknown types at all - is that your concern? Or is it that
applications might not recognize that application/x-myml and xml/x-myxml
could be the same thing?
It isn't clear to me whether your opposition is to the creation of new
top-level media types period, or just to xml/.
"... In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection
that the
Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map
of the
Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps
were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a
Map of
the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided
with it
point for point."
"When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first
impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be
the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or
world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon... but
the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his
Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as
zero."[1]
Cataloging and description is important. Borges was a librarian - I suspect
he'd agree.
[1] - From "The Library of Babel", in _Labyrinths_. (James E. Irby,
translator.) Originally from _Ficciones_, 1956.
Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (June)
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com