Re: [apps-discuss] APPSDIR review of draft-ietf-appsawg-media-type-regs-07

[Ned Freed <[e-mail]>]

> On 17/05/2012, at 10:55 AM, Ned Freed wrote:
> >
> >> I'm not talking about re-defining the concepts, I'm saying that a quick,
> >> non-normative summary of what they are, along with pointers to more detailed
> >> information elsewhere, would help readers.
> >
> > Then feel to suggest text.

> Replace section 1 (Introduction) with:

> """
> Recent Internet protocols have been carefully designed to be easily
> extensible in certain ways. In particular, many protocols, including but
> not limited to HTTP [RFC2616] and MIME [RFC2045], are capable of carrying
> arbitrary labeled content.

> The mechanism used to label such content is a media type, consisting of a
> top-level type and a subtype, which is further structured into trees.
> Optionally, media types can define companion data, known as parameters.

> For example,

>   text/plain; charset=utf-8
  
> has a top-level type of "text", a subtype of "plain", which places the media
> type in the standards tree. Here, the "charset" parameter is serialised as it
> would be in HTTP.

> A registration process is needed for these labels, so that that the set of
> such values are defined in a reasonably orderly, well-specified, and public
> manner.

> Therefore, this document defines media type specification and registration
> procedures that use the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) as a
> central registry.

> The media type registry managed by the procedures defined here can be found at
> <http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/>.
> """

> Just a suggestion, of course; I'm sure it can be improved upon.

With the exception of the example, which I think is unnecessary, this basically
seem fine to me. I don't see it as much of an improvement to be honest, but the
one thing it does do that I like is that by talking about the location of the
registry I can eliminate the section that does that.

				Ned