Subject: Re: Mime-types
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Thu Feb 08 2001 - 14:02:14 CST
> One minor detail - what is the Abiword mime-type? I guess something
> like application/x-abiword would be a reasonable stab at it. Or do
> we want to register it officially, and hence lose the 'x-'? Or
> even, has someone already registered it?
I think we want to register a MIME type officially. It's a fairly
painless process, and I'd be happy to own the logistics of doing the
registration once there is some concensus on what it should be. (So,
if someone else wants to do the registration stuff, tell me explicitly
or I'll assume it's on my plate.)
The controlling document for this is RFC-2048. Here are some
highlights from that and my own biased experience/observations of the
process (you get to guess which is which :-)
* Absolutely, positively forget "X-".
* Forget anything related to "xml". Yeah, sure, Abi stuff uses XML
for storage, but it's not like some other generic XML application
can do anything rational with it. What if an asteroid hit the Earth
and we migrated to a non-XML format? We're programmers ... let's be
a little abstract here. :-)
* Forget "text/...". Sure, it's text in the same sense as "text/html"
or "text/xml" at the characters-flying-by-me level, but those
formats can be operated on by many different tools in a functionally
equivalent way. We want to be in the "application/..." space.
* OTOH, RFC-2046 specifically calls out "text/..." thusly: "Possible
subtypes of "text" thus include any word processor format that can
be read without resorting to software that understands the format."
I don't happen to agree with that philosophy, but certainly many
people do.
* In the "application/..." and "text/..." spaces (as well as the other
spaces), there are sort of "generic" things you can register and
there are vendor-specific things you can register. The vendor stuff
looks like "application/vnd.foo.bar" or "application/vnd.foo-bar"
and has essentially no review process (other than administrative at
IANA). Almost, it's a carving-out-some-namespace stuff. The
generic stuff looks like "application/foobar" and is subject to a
full IETF-style review process. Even though the vendor stuff is
described as "commercially available", I don't think it really
perverts the process too much to put our stuff there.
* Within the "vnd." space, you can have either a "well-known" product
name or a vendor name and a product name.
Given all of the above, I think the first-cut logical choices are:
application/vnd.abisource.abiword
application/vnd.abiword
or, with more trouble,
application/abiword
or
text/vnd.abisource.abiword
text/vnd.abiword
or, with more trouble,
text/abiword
I personally favor "application/vnd.abiword", but let's hear what the
silverbacks among us think.
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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