[RESEND] Media types for RDF languages N3 and Turtle

Garret Wilson garret at globalmentor.com
Fri Dec 21 15:59:15 CET 2007


Garret Wilson wrote:
> I don't have a strong opinion here, but I will point out that RFC 2046 
> talks about the category being "the highest level" division and that 
> it is "useful". To me, it is useful at a high level to note that the 
> content types discussed here have the following characteristics:
>
> * The content bytes are interpreted as text characters (i.e. Unicode 
> code points); ignoring encoding, no bytes are interpreted as anything 
> other than text characters. (These text characters may later be 
> subject to some meta-interpretation---e.g. delimiters---but they are 
> first interpreted as text characters.)
>
> * These content types can always be edited in a text editor.
>
> * Abstract values, such as numbers, are represented by their text 
> lexical forms, not by some non-text encoding.

Oh, and I forgot to add (perhaps most importantly):

* I can allow CVS or Subversion or some other version control system 
manage the file as text, not binary, even able to do diffs and merges 
based upon end-of-line characters.

To me, that's where the power of the text/* types come in---we can do 
processing on them as text.

Garret


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