Re: Atom Content Negotiation (follow-up)

[Hadrien Gardeur <[e-mail]>]

>
> like i said before, philosophically, i do agree that this would be cleaner
> and the better approach. but we would need to update the atom spec which, as
> i am reading it, does not allow for extensibility of media type parameters:
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287#section-7 says that the only allowed
> parameter is "charset". i think the way to go for all of this to be nice and
> clean would be to add a "content-type" parameter, which as a value would
> have a media type (the media type of the content embedded or linked to by
> the feed). this raises two questions:
>

There's also http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023#section-12



> - is that kind of parameter value even allowed in a media type? and if it
> is, how many media type parsers might possibly break because a media type
> would contain "two media types"?
>

That's a valid point indeed.



> - how realistic is it to update RFC 4287 in that way, which as i understand
> it would not be backwards compatible?
>
> if that was a realistic way to go, even things such as
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html#rel-alternate might need to be
> updated, so that the new features would be allowed/supported (and shouldn't
> HTML5 allow the optional charset parameter that is possible according to RFC
> 4287?).
>
> any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated. kind regards,


I believe that what you're trying to deal with is actually a much more
generic problem than what you're describing.

If I'm distributing bitmap files, but for obvious reasons, I decide to use a
zip archive containing all these bitmap files together, how do I indicate in
Atom that this archive contains bitmap files ? We do not have an easy way to
express this kind of information in Atom, we simply point to the archive
URL, using the zip mimetype. Other containers (DRM files for example,
various audio & video containers) have a similar problem.

As far as I can tell, you're interested in using Atom as an
envelope/container, to distribute multiple representations of the same
information. In this case, what you're actually doing is not "content
negotiation", it is the exact same situation than with other containers.

Hadrien