Re: [jose] Should we keep or remove the JOSE JWS and JWE MIME types?

I'm okay dropping them.

On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 2:39 PM, Edmund Jay <ejay@mgi1.com> wrote:

> +1 in favor of dropping
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Mike Jones <Michael.Jones@microsoft.com>
> *To:* "jose@ietf.org" <jose@ietf.org>
> *Sent:* Tue, June 18, 2013 6:42:15 PM
> *Subject:* [jose] Should we keep or remove the JOSE JWS and JWE MIME
> types?
>
>  The JWS and JWE documents currently define these MIME types for the
> convenience of applications that may want to use them:
>
>                 application/jws
>
>                 application/jws+json
>
>                 application/jwe
>
>                 application/jwe+json
>
>
>
> That being said, I’m not aware of any uses of these by applications at
> present.  Thus, I think that makes it fair game to ask whether we want to
> keep them or remove them – in which case, if applications ever needed them,
> they could define them later.
>
>
>
> Another dimension of this question for JWS and JWE is that it’s not clear
> that the four types application/jws, application/jws+json, application/jwe,
> and application/jwe+json are even the right ones.  It might be more useful
> to have generic application/jose and application/jose+json types, which
> could hold either JWS or JWE objects respectively using the compact or JSON
> serializations (although I’m not advocating adding them at this time).
>
>
>
> Having different JWS versus JWE MIME types apparently did contribute to at
> least Dick’s confusion about the purpose of the “typ” field, so deleting
> them could help eliminate this possibility of confusion in the future.
> Thus, I’m increasingly convinced we should get rid of the JWS and JWE types
> and leave it up to applications to define the types they need, when they
> need them.
>
>
>
> Do people have use cases for these four MIME types now or should we leave
> them to future specs to define, if needed?
>
>
>
>                                                                 -- Mike
>
>
>
> P.S.  For completeness, I’ll add that the JWK document also defines these
> MIME types:
>
>                 application/jwk+json
>
>                 application/jwk-set+json
>
>
>
> There are already clear use cases for these types, so I’m not advocating
> deleting them, but wanted to call that out explicitly.  For instance, when
> retrieving a JWK Set document referenced by a “jku” header parameter, I
> believe that the result should use the application/jwk-set+json type.  (In
> fact, I’ll add this to the specs, unless there are any objections.)
> Likewise, draft-miller-jose-jwe-protected-jwk-02 already uses
> application/jwk+json.  Both could also be as “cty” values when encrypting
> JWKs and JWK Sets, in contexts where that that would be useful.
>
>
>
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