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

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Oct 1998 21:49:25 +0100

At 18:29 30/09/98 -0700, Ted Hardie wrote:

[...]
>	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.

FWIW, I agree, and I think this may be why this debate is happenning.

I *think* Koen may be referring to capabilities of devices that render
character values directly in some sense, rather than the use of text to
encode other forms of data.  This suggests to me that Al's suggestion of
using HTML media types may be helpful in this area.

I also agree with Larry that this is a sufficiently complex area that it
should be separated from the "obvious" media features.

#g

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

---

From: [email-masked] (Koen Holtman)
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 11:35:16 +0200 (MET DST)

Graham Klyne:
[...]
>using HTML media types may be helpful in this area.

I see textonly as a tag which is mainly used for labling _content_,
e.g. the HTML page with a picture of something vs. the HTML page with a
textual description of the same thing.  Knowing that a device
(browser) has 'textonly=true' would not tell you all that much about
the device.

A more general comment: I will review the situation in XML etc.
before actually writing a tag definition. Thanks for all the
references.  I am aware of the work in the w3c but it has been a while
since I last reviewed its status.

>Graham Klyne

Koen.

---

From: Al Gilman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 09:11:08 -0400 (EDT)

Note that we did succeed in getting the HTML 4.0 specification
worded to accept media descriptors not pre-defined in the spec.
It doesn't say "MEDFREE" in the HTML 4.0 spec.  But we did manage
to save a spot for the registry concept in the logic of
stylesheet selection.

In addition to the descriptions of the predefined media options
in the HTML 4.0 specification, you might also want to visit

   Linkname: HTML4/CSS2 Accessibility Recommendations
        URL: http://www.w3.org/WAI/HC/report.html#MEDIA

for a more explicit discussion of the application of
extensibility to adaptive technology.

Al

to follow up on what Koen Holtman said:
> From [email-masked]  Fri Oct  2 05:39:55 1998
> From: [email-masked] (Koen Holtman)
> Message-Id: <[email-masked]>
> Subject: Re: Comments on draft-ietf-conneg-media-features-02.txt
> To: [email-masked] (Graham Klyne)
> Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 11:35:16 +0200 (MET DST)
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]> from "Graham Klyne" at Oct 1, 98 09:49:25 pm
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> Sender: [email-masked]
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