Subject: Re: Mime-types
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sun Feb 11 2001 - 02:17:49 CST
At 05:31 PM 2/8/01 -0800, WJCarpenter wrote:
>paul> Does adding the vnd. prefix really help that much in the IETF
>paul> process? An argument could quite easily be made that:
>
>Yeah, there is a specific and significant process difference. With
>"vnd." you can pretty much register whatever you want as long as it
>isn't obviously bogus. Without "vnd." you get the IETF review
>process, including the publishing of an RFC and approval by the IESG
>before the subtype can be registered. "vnd." was invented to get past
>all that process stuff for vendor subtypes. (If it makes you feel any
>better, RFC-2048 says they use a liberal interpretation of "vendor".)
Hmm. I hate to ask you to take on the larger project for overly frivolous
reasons, but I'm not eager to jump through the .vnd "escape hatch" just yet.
We want the .abw format to be as ubiquitous as RTF or HTML, or even more so.
The IETF review process, with its historical focus on "rough consensus and
running code" sounds rather appealing, actually.
Sure, it's more work, but it'd have a number of advantages:
1. It almost certainly forces us to have a reliable spec for the format.
2. I can't think of a better source of pragmatic design review.
3. It's a great way to earn a certain kind of credibility.
4. It's not shabby for marketing reasons, either.
All told, RFCs and approval by the IESG are pretty cool things to have. And
a little voice tells me that we may be exactly the kind of thing they'd
think kindly of.
Bottom line
-----------
If it were up to me (and it's not), I'd probably just skip all of this and
just start using a consistent, unregistered, non-vnd type now -- I have a
slight preference for application/abiword, but text/abiword is arguable --
on all our platforms.
We can always do the process later, when our userbase is in the millions and
not just the hundreds of thousands. ;-)
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sun Feb 11 2001 - 02:10:11 CST