Subject: Re: Comments on draft-ietf-conneg-media-features-02.txt

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 20:38:10 +0100

At 08:25 30/09/98 -0400, Al Gilman wrote:
[...]
>That is your perception of the market trends, is it?  I am not
>sure I know which way that wind is blowing.

In this case, I don't think we have to.  (Notwithstanding my earlier
comments) I think it's legitimate to register a feature tag for which an
early requirement is perceived:  this does not preclude later registration
of additional tags that fine-tune the idea.

This is why we have an extensible framework, isn't it?

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])

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From: Al Gilman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 16:27:54 -0400 (EDT)

> of additional tags that fine-tune the idea.

Right on!

> This is why we have an extensible framework, isn't it?

On the other hand, registering a new and different term which is
for all practical purposes synonymous with what one might say in
pidgin XML as

... html4:media="tty"

would seem to subtract from the bottom-line utility of the
Internet as a communciations medium.

If the registration practice doesn't contain a bit of scholarship
applied to "justify why we need something new" then the user
will be left confused as to which of N registered terms to use
for a given sense.

Al

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From: [email-masked] (Ted Hardie)
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 18:29:13 -0700 (PDT)

Al, Graham, Koen,
	There is always some tension between wanting extensibility and
wanting ease of implementation and interoperability.  I think the key
thing we need to encourage is that those who are proposing tags
indicate their scope very carefully.  I believe that negotiation on
the values being discussed is clearly indicated in the case Koen
raises, but I also believe that "textonly" is too broad a rubric for
that case.  My pidgin XML isn't that good, but I would be happy to
take that as a basis for discussing where the line could be
appropriately drawn.
	As an aside, I believe this particular instance illustrates a
problem with the practicalities of MIME media type designations.  Some
mime media types are used to create compound objects, without those
compound objects being directly referenced as MIME types.  Without
that compounding turning text/ objects like HTML into multimedia
objects, this media feature wouldn't be necessary.  You wouldn't
use a textonly tag on a text/plain object, and you don't mean
that there is no markup in a text/html object if you apply it there.
		just my take on it,
				Ted Hardie
				NASA/STX

On Sep 30,  4:27pm, Al Gilman wrote:
> Subject: Re: Comments on draft-ietf-conneg-media-features-02.txt
>-- End of excerpt from Al Gilman