Review solicited for application/cellml+xml

[Andrew Miller]

Quoting Mark Baker <distobj at acm.org>:

> That looks much better, Andrew.
>
> My only remaining comment (which I mentioned before, and Eric P
> concurred) is that you should pick a CellML-specific file extension.
This has been discussed extensively by the CellML group, see for example
*http://www.cellml.org/meeting_minutes/meeting-minutes-for-2005/meeting_minutes_15.2.2005
*http://www.cellml.org/meeting_minutes/9.3.2006/
The consensus of the group is that .xml should be the only official file
extension.

We have several reasons for not encouraging anything other than .xml as the file
extension:
1) We have used .cml (which conflicted with other markup languages, like
Chemical Markup Language) in the past, and changed to .xml. Having a history of
too many file extensions makes it hard to encourage software vendors to stick
with a particular one.
2) There is currently repository software which uses .xml, and changing this
will likely create problems for (some) client software using the repositories.
3) Many users of CellML like to edit their models as XML in a text editor. Using
the XML extension allows this to work on systems which know nothing about
CellML.
4) Using a specific extension encourages software vendors to rely on this file
extension. Although all software developed at the Bioengineering Institute does
not rely on a specific file extension, there is software developed elsewhere
that will not open files which do not have a .cml file extension (even when the
user specifically tries to open that file in the program), and I have heard
that this is creating problems for users. By having only a more generic file
extension, we encourage software developers not to use the file extension to
determine whether they should open a certain file, and instead look at the MIME
type (where available) and/or the XML namespace.

Best regards,
Andrew Miller


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