Re: [apps-discuss] New I-D: text/markdown Media Type - draft-seantek-text-markdown-media-type-00

[Erik Wilde <[e-mail]>]

hello larry.

On 2014-07-09, 1:12, Larry Masinter wrote:
> A 'flavor' isn't (or shouldn't be) a 'profile'. Strictly speaking,
> a profile of a file format or protocol is a restriction of the
> original, where instances following the profile also can
> be interpreted correctly by any implementation of the
> full format or protocol.
> My impression is that the markdown flavors are not
> Subsets and add features as well  as restrict them.

i am not claiming to define 'profile' in a general way, but the way RFC 
6906 defines them (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6906#section-3) covers 
what larry is saying here. essentially, it says that a profile may be 
adding constraints, but it can also add extensions, as long as those 
extensions are within the bounds of the underlying extension model. if 
you can process something without knowing a profile and get to a 
reasonable result, then using profiles makes sense.

on the other hand, we have this comment from mark:

On 2014-07-09, 5:09, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> I thought about that, but these variants have the same problem that using the 'profile' parameter does; they're not subsets of markdown, they're incompatible variants.

if the various flavors of markdown indeed are incompatible, i.e. 
processing one of them using the general rules does not create 
reasonable results, then indeed profiles would not be a good concept to use.

generally speaking, profiles are useful if there is a solid foundation 
everybody can fall back to. if there isn't, then maybe it's like mark 
suggested: admit that there is fragmentation, and register media types 
for all those variants that are incompatible.

personally speaking, i think it may be hard to find out if and how 
formats are incompatible. most of them seem to be underspecified (no 
clear escaping and extension rules), so at the very least you may end up 
having to write a bunch of test cases and see what happens.

cheers,

dret.

-- 
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