Re: [media-types] New draft-duerst-mediaman-toplevel-00.txt (was: Re: WG: Still need an editor....)

[Chris Lilley <[e-mail]>]

Hi Martin, all,

On 2022-03-06 12:04, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> For what it's worth, I managed to create and submit a first version of 
> the draft we spoke about. Below are the details. The draft is 
> currently just a collection of ideas and references to history. Any 
> comments appreciated!

Overall very nice, I have some comments based on a read-through:

 > RFC 2046 
<https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-mediaman-toplevel-00.html#RFC2046> 
[RFC2046 
<https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-mediaman-toplevel-00.html#RFC2046>] 
discouraged the use of "X-" for (new) top-level types,

Probably worth mentioning that this is because of requests to 
standardize long-standing but unregistered types such as x-world/x-vrml 
which was in widespread use long before model/vrml.  I say unregistered 
rather than informal, because x-world/x-vrml is a part of the official 
VRML 1.0 specification (Nov 1995):

 > The MIME type for VRML files is defined as follows:

> x-world/x-vrml

 > The MIME major type for 3D world descriptions is x-world. The MIME 
minor type for VRML documents is x-vrml. Other 3D world descriptions, 
such as oogl for The Geometry Center's /Object-Oriented Geometry 
Language/, or iv, for SGI's /Open Inventor/ ASCII format, can be 
supported by using different MIME minor types.

 > http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/vrml1/

 > The 'font' top-level media type was defined in RFC 8081 
<https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-mediaman-toplevel-00.html#RFC8081> 
[RFC8081 
<https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-mediaman-toplevel-00.html#RFC8081>], 
a work of the 'justfont' IETF WG, in 2017

Correct, perhaps worth adding that this was formalizing the widespread 
use of the unofficial font/* top level type which people were using in 
preference to official, registered types.

The lack of (and fierce resistance to [1]) a font/* top level type is 
why WOFF 1.0 originally specified application/font-woff
https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/CR-WOFF-20110804/#appendix-b

and then changed to font/woff after RFC 8081 was published.
https://www.w3.org/Fonts/REC-WOFF-20121213-errata.html

It is also why CSS created, and still uses, "format strings" rather than 
Internet Media types to describe downloadable font formats.

 > Wikipedia (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_file_format) 
reports the unofficial use of a 'chemical' top-level type

I find "Wikipedia reports" a bit weak, and (on the basis of first-hand 
experience [2]) suggest instead:

A chemical/* top-level MIME type was proposed by Peter Murray-Rust and 
Henry Rzepa at a workshop at the First WWW conference in May 1994. It is 
still in widespread, but unregistered, use in that community.
https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemime/

[1] Ned Freed said to me, sometime around 1996, that a font/* top level 
type would never be allowed.
[2] I studied under Peter Murray-Rust, at Stirling University and 
participated in this and other workshops at the first WWW conference.

-- 
Chris Lilley
@svgeesus
Technical Director @ W3C
W3C Strategy Team, Core Web Design
W3C Architecture & Technology Team, Core Web & Media