Re: [apps-discuss] font/* (and draft-freed-media-type-regs)

[Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>]

# My personal opinion is that registering font/* type still makes a lot of sense and this is something we need to do

I think any definition of a new top level type should come with some use cases, some protocol or operation, which is more functional, reliable, better, improved, useful,.

#  even if it involves re-registering some of the existing subtypes under the new font/* tree.

Types with two names seem like more of a problem, and re-registering existing types with a potentially long tail of overlapping use problematic.

#  I brought this up for discussion at today's conference call with W3C WebFonts WG, and the general opinion was that having font/* type registered would still be a good thing for the industry.

I think we still need at least one concrete practical use case. Just asking in the abstract won't necessarily get you a good answer.

David Singer:
# I think that it's way overdue for us to work out whether everything [not [image | video | audio]] should be application, and if not, why not.

Everything else should be "application" unless there's a good reason for it.   For text/*, we at least had some hope of common "charset" parameters having some meaning. For image/*, there's at least the use case of a HTTP "accept: image/*" header (although I'm not sure how useful that is, in practice.).

But I'm having trouble imagining a use case for "font/*", even in the context of sniffing.

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net