At 01:33 05/07/14, Gerald McCobb wrote:
I asked the IESG to postpone the publication of the
application/xhtml-voice+xml media type as an informational RFC. The
registration is not correct. It should be application/xhtml+voice+xml.
The application/xhtml+voice+xml media type was the original submission.
There is an issue with the original submission:
One of the reviewers pointed out that "a certain class of error could be
avoided by renaming this application/xhtml-plus-voice+xml... I don't know
of any other "+xml" [see RFC3023] media types that have a "+" in the
name... a poorly-constructed regexp looking for +xml along the lines of
/\+(.*)$/ would miss this one."
I agree with that reviewer that the type should not contain
'+' characters except before 'xml'. All other subtypes have used '-'
as a separator. The '+' separator was specifically introduced to
express the fact that the '+xml' part is something more than
a simple subtype.
Although there is probably nothing in RFC 3023 explicitly
disallowing the use of '+' for "arbitrary use", I think that
the whole rationale for '+xml' in Appendix A of RFC 3023
(in particular http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt, A.12)
seem to indicate that it shouldn't be done.
I believe this argument is not strong enough to prevent approval of the
application/xhtml+voice+xml media type:
2. The argument for having "+" in the subtype is unconvincing, given that
the simplest method to determine if something is XML is also the safest,
that is, if the last four characters are "+xml" or "/xml" then the
document is XML, otherwise it is not. If that has to be done with regexps,
instead of just examining the last four bytes, that would be /[/+]xml$/.
If type and subtype were split already it would be /\+?xml$/ for the subtype.
I think the regexp example is only the tip of the iceberg. Not using
the plus will allow better future extensibility.
Regards, Martin.