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

[Chris Lilley <[e-mail]>]

I guess this published journal article could also be added to the 
references:

  Henry S. Rzepa, Peter Murray-Rust, and Benjamin J. Whitaker
/"The Application of Chemical Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions 
(Chemical MIME) Internet Standards to Electronic Mail and World Wide Web 
Information Exchange"/
J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 1998, *38, 6*, pp.976–982
https://doi.org/10.1021/ci9803233


On 2022-07-19 16:26, Chris Lilley wrote:
>
> 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

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