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

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

On 24/05/2012, at 8:39 PM, Henry S. Thompson wrote:

> 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").

Ah, that.

> 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.


What software? If it knows about the specific format -- whatever convention is used -- it's not necessary to have a convention. The convention is only good for software that DOESN'T know about the specific semantics/syntax of the format in use, but can derive some value from knowing a few generic conventions about it.

The only one I can come up with is a generic test tool, like the one that I run at <http://redbot.org/>; with this sort of information, it'd be able to colourise the syntax of a few more formats that pass through it. 

To me, that's pretty thin justification; I'm not asking for this, and I run one of these tools!

What I'm concerned about is that this may encourage people to register both XML and JSON variants of a format -- in fact, I suspect that this is part of the underlying motivation. I've already given my thoughts about that here <http://www.mnot.net/blog/2012/04/13/json_or_xml_just_decide>.

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/