Re: [media-types] More questions for multiple suffixes (Re: WG: IETF 112 agenda)

[Manu Sporny <[e-mail]>]

On 11/7/21 10:09 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> Have you considered just registering '+ldjson'?

Yes, we did think of registering "+jsonld" back in 2013 and, IIRC, were
instructed by IANA folks to just do "ld+json" since it was a JSON syntax with
added semantics.

This was further reinforced in JSON-LD 1.1, where they took up the question
again, I think engaging w/ the registry maintainer (I wasn't a part of that
discussion, so I don't know the details), considering if "+jsonld" should be
registered... and deciding that it would cause too much chaos to register both
"+ld+json" and "+jsonld" -- possibly breaking implementations out in the field.

Fast forward 6+ years and we have other media types that use "ld+json" to
encode themselves, and people wanting to use the media type to decide how to
process the documents and thus things like "vc+ld+json" and "did+ld+json" were
born... but when we tried to register them, the experts said "Umm, we're not
sure how to interpret that extra '+'."

> FWIW, I think Harald has hit upon many of the central questions, and we 
> should focus on them in the time we have.

I'm fine w/ taking the conversation in whatever direction folks want to take it.

> Another is that 6838 describes the use case for suffixes as 'well-known 
> structuring syntaxes' -- whereas linked data is a data model, not a syntax.
> While there's some fuzziness in this area, it might be good to talk about
> whether linked data is a 'structuring syntax' or something else.

It's an abstract data model that is formally described in:
https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/#data-model

It's not a structuring syntax.

Some have wondered why it's not "ld+vc+json"... and the answer there seemed to
be "because the Verifiable Credential isn't encoded in JSON... it's encoded in
JSON-LD"... the structure needs to go from most specific to least specific...
noting that the earlier parts of the media type describe data model-y things
and the latter parts of the media type describe syntax-y things.

It's a reasonable mental model, if not a bit fuzzy when it comes to components
in the middle.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
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