need advice on registration for YAML format

[Bjoern Hoehrmann]

* Julian Reschke wrote:
>currently there is no media type registered for YAML (see 
><http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html>). I'd like to change that.

That would be nice.

>Two questions though:
>
>1) YAML is a text format, but it has hardwired character sets, similar 
>to application/json (detectable via the BOM). This means, it really 
>needs to be registered under application/*, right?

It is not strictly necessary, but there is very little benefit to using
a "text" type (arguments for that usually go like "But it's text!", "It
is shorter!", "Some applications will try to render it as text!"). That
last feature is more interesting for YAML than it is for, say, JSON, as
it's harder to make YAML unreadable than it is to make JSON unreadable,
but applications also manage to render application/javascript and such
as text, so this isn't much of an argument.

Besides, application/yaml is already in use for YAML, for instance the
MediaWiki API uses that for its YAML output.

>2) yaml.org isn't a standards body recognized by the IETF. So, to get 
>into the standards tree, the canonical solution would be to move the 
>spec into an RFC, right? An alternative would be the vendor tree 
>(<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4288#section-3.2>). So would 
>application/vnd.yamlorg.yaml make sense?

Having the specification in an RFC would not be unwelcome, but I do not
think that is necessary (yaml.org may not meet the requirements for a
standards organization to register the types in the standards tree with
no RFC that registers the type there, but the specification should meet
the requirements for specifications in RFC 4288). So you basically need
a short RFC with some introduction, the template, and some notes about
security considerations (like pointing out the possibility of circular
references, to pick an example).
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/