Media Type Registration for OCF (application/epub+zip) - Review of Informational RFC

[Larry Masinter]

I should have noted that the document describing the
+zip convention should also update the (1993) MIME
type registration for application/zip.



-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Masinter [mailto:LMM at acm.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 10:07 AM
To: 'Ned Freed'; 'John C Klensin'
Cc: Ric Wright; 'Nick Bogaty'; 'John Rivlin'; 'gc at ebooktechnologies.com';
'ietf-types at alvestrand.no'
Subject: RE: Media Type Registration for OCF (application/epub+zip) - Review
of Informational RFC

If the problem with "+zip" is that it isn't sufficiently well
defined, perhaps an approach would be to define it:

I'd start with:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format) 

(maybe leaving out the history, but including most of the
introduction and technical information)

and note that just as

" Some software uses the ZIP file format as a wrapper for a large number of
small items in a specific structure. Generally when this is done a different
file extension is used."

In those situations, using a different MIME type seems also
appropriate, and using "+zip" in the MIME type appropriate
(but not mandatory).


-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-types-bounces at alvestrand.no
[mailto:ietf-types-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Ned Freed
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 4:50 PM
To: John C Klensin
Cc: 'Ric Wright'; Nick Bogaty; 'John Rivlin'; gc at ebooktechnologies.com;
ietf-types at alvestrand.no
Subject: RE: Media Type Registration for OCF (application/epub+zip) - Review
of Informational RFC



> --On Friday, 07 September, 2007 17:27 -0400 Nick Bogaty
> <nbogaty at idpf.org> wrote:

> >...
> > 2. The currently adopted OCF standard uses a MIME type of
> > "application/epub+zip". It would be difficult to change that
> > as it has already gone through a standard adoption process and
> > is used in commercially released products.
> >...

> It is up to the IESG as to what to do about this.   While I
> personally generally prefer registration of something that has
> already been deployed to non-registration and the risk of
> confusion, many of us would consider establishing a precedent
> for either arbitrary "+foo" form, and "+zip" in particular, to
> be a very bad idea.  I comments from others on this list would
> be welcome.

First, a data point you may be unaware of: A fair number vnd. types have
been
registered that use zip as a container for a bunch of other stuff. But until
now none of them used +zip as a type name suffix.

I have to say I don't see this as significantly different from the +xml
case.
Knowing the format of the container can be useful information since it lets
you
process the type in a generic way. My main concern with the +zip case is
whether or not "zip" is sufficiently well defined. I admit to not knowing
much
about the vagarities of zip.

> For future reference for IDPF and others, it would have been
> much better to have consulted this list about choices of names,
> etc., before this name was deployed.   The "+xml" form,
> including that used in "oebps-package+xml", is well-established
> and has fairly specific semantics (to which oebps-package+xml
> appears to conform).  There is no such arrangement for "+zip"
> or, for some very specific reasons, any other compression scheme.

There's a big difference between registering application/zip as a generic
compression/container media type versus adopting a convention of using +zip
as
a suffix for types which use zip as a containiner for an
appplication-specific
set of subobjects that need to be carried around as a package. I am strongly
opposed to the former, modulo the definition of zip I think the latter may
be a
good idea.

Speaking as an individual contributor, not as media type reviewer.

				Ned