Re: [apps-discuss] Questions about Structured Syntax Suffixes (SSS)

[[e-mail] (Henry S. Thompson)]

Mark Nottingham writes:

> Question: Is this actually useful in practice? I.e., what are the
> real-world use cases for SSS?
>
> We started this experiment with +xml, and I'm not aware of much
> software that uses that suffix to great advantage (please educate me
> if I'm overlooking something).

Good question!  I did a quick check, and the four browsers I looked at
did _not_ treat material served as application/foo+xml as XML (unless
its URI ended with ".xml").

So _currently_ (aside from application/html+xml, which is recognised
as a unit, not specifically as allowing generic XML processing because
of the '+xml') the suffix serves only, as you suggest, as
human-readable confirmation of expectations.

_But_ I think there is at least a potential upside going forward, in
that as we see both ...+xml and ...+json variants of particular types,
I _would_ expect software to dispatch on this information, rather than
sniffing.  Or, to turn that around, if we _don't_ support SSS, we are
in practice requiring applications to sniff.

ht
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       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
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