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

["Martin J. Dürst" <[e-mail]>]

Hello Chris,

Many thanks for your comments.

One point first: Do you know anybody interested in writing up a draft 
that proposes to register "chemical" and the various subtypes? Now might 
be a good time while we have the mediaman WG. I guess Peter Murray-Rust 
may already have retired, but somebody else may be interested.

Regards,   Martin.

On 2022-07-19 22:31, Chris Lilley wrote:
> 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
> 

-- 
Prof. Dr.sc. Martin J. Dürst
Department of Intelligent Information Technology
College of Science and Engineering
Aoyama Gakuin University
Fuchinobe 5-1-10, Chuo-ku, Sagamihara
252-5258 Japan