Ned,
Thanks for your message in reply:
When someone submits a new Content-disposition value or parameter
registration -- http://xml.resource.org/public/rfc/html/rfc2183.html --
the Area Directors and IESG would be best served to refrain from deferring
the registration decision to secretive industry consortia who have only to
do with one of the many uses of the header.
First of all, since IANA is the resistration agency specified by RFC 2183,
you appear to be asserting that IANA is "a secretive industry consortia".
Sorry, I meant the W3C, which has multiple, specific, and far-reaching
non-disclosure terms even for independent participants as part of its
by-laws, completely unlike IANA. My opinion of the W3C's culture of
secrecy is so low that I support reverting the entire text/html family of
type registrations back to the IETF. I don't know how closely you are
watching the progress of the W3C working groups, but many of them are more
than a couple of years behind their own schedules. If they were IETF
Working Groups, the stalled and blocked WGs would be reviewed and closed,
but the W3C needs their lucrative membership fees, the participants love
the deductable junkets and ill-informed prestege, so I predict the W3C WGs
such as XForms (to which I was referred by the previos Applications AD)
will probably be around soaking up time and resources for as long as HTML
is being used. Worse yet, some of the people with the most authority in
the W3C have clearly vested interests in closed, proprietary protocols
such as WAP/WML. Can you think of one function of the W3C that would not
be better served by the IESG and IETF?
...the registration of such things as type and disposition parameters has
been shown to have nontrivial technical repercussions in fair number of
cases. IANA has neither the expertise nor the desire to perform technical
evaluations of this sort, so when they come up they usually contact the
IESG and ask how to proceed.
The way more modern registration procedures work is that the IANA refers
registrations it receives to a reviewer appointed by the IESG. The reviewer
then reviews the request, applying the registration criteria specified by the
relevant standard. If the registration meets those criteria it is approved, it
not it is returned with an explanation of what is wrong and how to fix it.
That is all I would ask for the "device" disposition parameter
registration. But that is nowhere near my experience. What actually
happened, was that an Area Director at the time also assumed that the
registration had no purpose outside of multipart/form-data HTML upload
forms, and told me to wait and see what the W3C decided, when the whole
reason that I had filed the registration is that the XForms working
group chair and staff contact had told me that they would wait and see
what the IESG did with the Content-disposition registration before
further agendizing my device-upload proposal.
When I pointed out that the situation was a Catch-22, the XForms chair
apologized profusely but made it clear that I wasn't allowed to say
anything about it. When I balked at that, the W3C complained to my
company's Advisory Committee representative, who complained to my
Cisco manager, and shortly thereafter I was fired without explaination.
Although I still don't know, I suspect I was accused of violating my
non-disclosure agreements. I will never forget how I was treated.
Not having seen any previous attempt to register a "device"
content-disposition parameter....
Perhaps you've revised this proposal so it uses a new "device"
content-disposition parameter. If that's the case, while I see no
obvious procedural problem with the registration separate from the
overall proposal, I have to wonder what the value of such a parameter
is in isolation.
Consider multiple devices producing or accepting the same media type. For
example, if I send you an email with an audio/basic attachment, is there
value in your knowing whether it came directly from my microphone or off
of my file system? I think there is. I would really like to know what
you think. Is there some better way to communicate the source information?
Does anyone disagree? If so, why?
I certainly do. See above.
And now that you know I was referring to W3C instead of IANA?
Keith can probably point you to the original registration request, or
let me know if you want me to send a copy.
Cheers,
James