MIME types for preliminary community review

[Ben Morrow]

At  9pm on 11/11/04 you (Paul Sandoz) wrote:

> MIME media type name:
> application
> 
> MIME subtype name:
> soap+fastinfoset

This is an incorrect generalization of the name 'soap+xml'. Names with +
in them are (IIRC) currently reserved, except for the case of '+xml' to
indicate an format which uses XML. The name should be
'soap-fastinfoset', or you should propose that the IETF extend the
'+xml' syntax to other types (such as fastinfoset) and get an IANA
registry set up for such types... personally, I think that would be a
very good idea (I can think of at least two other uses for this
convention: '+zip' for formats which are a zip file with a specific
layout, such as JAR, Perl's PAR, mozilla.org's XPI and Quake's pk3; and
'+gzip'/'+bzip2' to denote a gzip compressed version of a format), but
it would need proper discussion and specification.

> Magic number(s):
> A W3C SOAP message infoset serialized as a fast infoset document may begin 
> with one of the following byte sequences:
> 
> - a byte sequence that corresponds to a UTF-8 encoded XML declaration of the 
> string "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='finf'", the first five bytes of which 
> are hexadecimal 3C 3F 78 6D 6C;

The first five bytes here are not the relevant ones; the important bytes
are the 66 69 6e 66 at position 31; perhaps a sentence to the effect of
'fast infoset documents can be XML documents with an encoding of 'finf'
specified in the XML declaration' with a reference to the XML
registration for how to identify and parse an XML document. Also, this
does not identify specifically a soap fast infoset entity, merely a
generic fast infoset entity, so this whole section should probably just
reference the next registration unless there is a way to reliably
identify those fast infosets used in SOAP.

I'm a little worried about 'bytes' as opposed to 'octets': what's the
IETF position on this? 'octets' is definitely less ambiguous.

> MIME media type name:
> application
> 
> MIME subtype name:
> fastinfoset

Is it worth registering two separate types, 'application/fastinfoset'
and 'application/fastinfoset+xml' for fast infosets that are not and are
encoded as XML documents, respectively?

Ben

-- 
Every twenty-four hours about 34k children die from the effects of poverty.
Meanwhile, the latest estimate is that 2800 people died on 9/11, so it's like
that image, that ghastly, grey-billowing, double-barrelled fall, repeated
twelve times every day. Full of children. [Iain Banks]         ben at morrow.me.uk