text/wiki vs dozens of text/vnd.*.wiki

[Martin Duerst]

[This is just a personal opinion!]

At 12:26 04/02/29 +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:
>On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Mario Salzer wrote:
>
> > Now the question: Does it make any sense on attempting
> > standardization such an text/plain-alike "hypertext format"
> > (would become text/wiki) or should the over-registration of
> > MIME types (which only were minor variations of each other!)
> > just happen?
>
>For the first question: YES it makes sense! DO IT. The Internet needs a
>Wiki interchange format standard.

I'm not sure at all about it. I see the various Wiki conventions
as a hack to get around the sad lack of tools for easy editing of
Web pages and parts of Web pages. At the W3C, we use HTTP Put
together with an editor that supports this. That's how the Web
was designed, and that's how it should work. What's particular
for a Wiki is that a) it's a page that is very explicitly open
to a wide range of people to write to; b) it's usually not the
overall page, but just the main area, that's written to.

In my view, the right interchange format is something that already
has a mime type, namely HTML. For the 'parts of Web pages' part,
you can use some HTML subset, e.g. just everything that can be in
a paragraph, or everthing that can be inside a dif,... There are
technologies that allow you to specify the subset, such as DTDs,
XML Schema, and RelaxNG.

Having a 'styled text' forms control would also be great.
In my personal opinion, it should be standard in XForms.

Regards,    Martin.



>There are two possible fora:
>
>1. Workgroup at W3.org to get this done. (W3 people are at this list and
>    may tell their view on the subject). I *think* W3 would very much
>    recognize Wiki as their baby.
>
>2. Workgroup at IETF to get this done, if W3 don't want it.
>
>Both approaches will cost incredible amounts of time and energy :-)
>
>We cannot stop people from registering vnd.xxx and prs.xxx types. However,
>from experience a very few people go through the (very simple) process of
>actually registering such MIME types anyway. Their interchange needs are
>not big enough.
>
>Linus Walleij