Comments solicited on application/cellml+xml

[Mark Baker]

On 3/27/06, Andrew Miller <ak.miller at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am proposing that the MIME media type application/cellml+xml be used for
> CellML documents.
>
> Please see the Internet draft draft-miller-media-type-cellml-00.txt, available
> at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-miller-media-type-cellml-00.txt,
> for the full registration.

Some comments ...

Section 3, last paragraph.  I consider the versioning strategy you
define there to be bad practice and so would recommend against it.  It
appears to say that the next incremental version of CellML will use a
new namespace, which would make it incompatible with existing
processors.  Plus, if some future change is significant enough to make
breaking backwards compatibility necessary or desirable, a new media
type seems a better option to me.

Section 4.  Many media types have thought they needed some kind of
"version" parameter, but in practice, it's never or rarely used.  e.g.
text/html had "level", and later, "version", and neither saw
widespread use.  The reason, I believe, is because the media type
(minus parameters) is a name that identifies not just a particular
data format, but a series of compatible formats.  Consider that
text/html was used for HTML 2.0/3.2/4.01.

Section 4.  I'd suggest picking a CellML-specific file extension,
given that a lot of Web servers are configured to send ".xml" files as
either text/rss, application/xml, or application/rss+xml.

Mark.
--
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.       http://www.markbaker.ca