At 09:16 AM 5/10/99 -0700, Ned Freed wrote:
1) What are the real 'costs' of adding a new top-level MIME type?
It has been reported that there is deployed software that has to be changed
to deal with new top-level types (a big design botch in my opinion). This
came up when the model top-level type was added.
There's also the cost of writing it up and getting it standardized. It is
likely that there would be strong objection to defining such a type (I
certainly would object because I don't see this as being properly
orthogonal to
several of the existing top-level types).
So the practical costs are caused by 'reports' of poorly written software,
while the political costs are caused by a group of dug-in individuals on
philosophical grounds. It doesn't sound promising, but it also sounds like
the real costs are political, not caused by implementations. (We would
hope that those folks fixed their software correctly after the experience
of model, but can't count on it, of course.)
(3) Recommand/require that the names of XML-based types have "-xml" at the
end of the name. This is the same as (2) in terms of effort, but might
be a win in that matching a suffix might be easier/cleaner to do in
some contexts (the beginnnings of these strings are grotted up with
registration tree information).
I could live with this.
2) What are the real 'costs' of creating separate content-negotiation
protocols?
The costs are that there are contexts where you're unlikely to see the
ability to use such things in the forseeable future, and where you'd
really like to make choices based on knowing the XML variant in use.
Here we agree completely, it seems.
I'm afraid that I'm unconvinced that the costs of 1 are greater than the
costs of 2. Are there genuine compatibility issues, or is this just
philosophical opposition?
The former, according to reports we've gotten in the past.
I'd like to hear more detail on these 'reports'. It's hard to base a
cost-benefit analysis on reports with no owners or details. As I noted
above, it sounds like philosophical opposition - politics - is the real
roadblock.
Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (June)
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http://www.simonstl.com