If what I am reading is correct it sounds like the real design mistake here
was putting semantics into content types in the first place.
No, the mistake is in reading more into the very limited semantics of top level
types than was ever intended. As Harald says, the way SDP uses top level types
is at odds with their intent. And we have two choices: Fix that mistake or
continue to kludge around it.
I also agree with Harald that it is up to the RAI area to deal with the
mistake. Perhaps the right choice is to continue kludging, but if so the
approach at least needs to be justified a bit better than it has been in the
past.
A code point registration should be just that, registration of a unique
identifier to prevent confusion. Once people start adding semantics into the
identifier the choice of name starts to have consequences.
The choice of a name has consequences ab initio. It is a name, after all, and
we attach significance and meaning to names independent of any contexual
semantics.
Now, you could argue that media types should be assigned numbers, not names, or
even better a meaningless string of characters. This would avoid the both the
semantics associated with names as well as any semantics attachment issue. But
it comes at the expense of readability, and at the time the system was set up
it was felt that having readable type names had benefits well worth the costs.
Similarly, the very limited semantics associated with the top level type name
were felt to be sufficiently useful to include. And even if I were convinced
this choice was wrong (and I'm a long way away from that), it's a done deal
now.
At one point there were people arguing that it should be application/html.
They were wrong and they were (rightly) ignored. But the arguments made then
demonstrated that the taxonomic scheme for the semantics was bogus.
No, it demonstrated that it is a weak scheme. Which is all it was ever intended
to be.
Ned
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