Re: Scope of application/* media types (was: Protocol changes in draft-allbery-usefor-usepro-00)

["Charles Lindsey" <[e-mail]>]

In <[e-mail]> Russ Allbery <[e-mail]> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <[e-mail]> writes:
>> Russ Allbery <[e-mail]> writes:
>>> Charles Lindsey <[e-mail]> writes:

>>>> 26. [-1] (4.2,4.3) Removed requirement that
>>>> application/news-[groupinfo,checkgroups] MUST NOT be used except with
>>>> relevant control messages.

>> Application types are intended to cause applications to be invoked, with
>> possible side effects.

>Could you provide a reference for this?  I don't see this statement in RFC
>2046.  The closest that it has is:

>   The "application" media type is to be used for discrete data which do
>   not fit in any of the other categories, and particularly for data to
>   be processed by some type of application program.  This is
>   information which must be processed by an application before it is
>   viewable or usable by a user.

OK. Perhaps I was carried away by the propensity of Microsoftware to
execute anything that is remotely executable even if the user just blinks
:-( .

And it is certainly the case that application types are mostly intended to
be processed by application programs that may have side effects beyond
fancy forms of display. And RFC 2046 goes to considerable lengths to warn
agains possible side effects of obeying an application/postscript.

>> In this case, the side efect is that a line gets added/changed in the
>> Newsgroups file.

>I don't agree with this interpretation, and I don't see anything in the
>text of the application/news-groupinfo registration that reflects this.

I doubt if you would be sending an application/group-info in an
article/message unless you thought that the recipient might want to use it
for exactly that purpose.

>It sounds to me like you're confusing the newgroup control message with
>the application/news-groupinfo MIME media type.  They're not the same
>thing.

But are clearly related.

>> OK, in that case what you need to say is:

>>     This media type is intended to be used in conjunction with the
>>     newgroup control message as described in section 5.2.1. It MUST NOT be
>>     automatically invoked in any other context without explicit human
>>     intervention.

>> and similarly for checkgroups.

>I disagree with adding anything like this to our document.

OK. In which case the existing sentences at the start of 4.2 and 4.3 will
suffice.

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