Review solicited for application/cellml+xml

[Mark Baker]

Andrew, thanks for the detailed response.  You've obviously thought a
lot about this.

For the reasons I gave, I would still recommend a new extension be
defined.  But I'd also suggest describing the use of ".xml", perhaps
listing some of the pros (as you described) and cons (as I described)
so that authors can decide which extension works best for them.

What do others think?

Mark.

On 5/9/06, Andrew Miller <ak.miller at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> 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