Scripting Media Types

[Chris Lilley]

On Wednesday, February 9, 2005, 2:08:27 PM, Bjoern wrote:

BH> * Bruce Lilly wrote:
>>First, the proposed text subtypes are inappropriate; text subtypes
>>are reserved for human-readable text content, with or without
>>markup; see RFC 2046 section 4.  They are not to be used for
>>arbitrary content which happens to be textual, such as programming
>>and scripting languages; they are reserved for natural language.

BH> That's probably true, but the alternative would be to continue using the
BH> unregistered types for several years as the application/* types are much
BH> less well-supported. For example, all SVG implementations I am aware of
BH> that support relevant scripting,support text/ecmascript (as the relevant
BH> specifications suggest)

Yes

BH> while none support application/ecmascript.

because the spec doesn't say to. However, if the preferred and
registered media type was application/ecmascript, then the SVG spec
could require support for this type.


>>Second, the draft mentions the proposed types as if they were
>>already registered, which they are not. E.g."use of and support for the
>>   media type application/ecmascript is considerably less widespread
>>   than of text/ecmascript"

BH> Could you elaborate on this point? I am not quite sure how the draft
BH> suggests that these types are registered, in fact, it says that they
BH> are not. Maybe you can make a suggestion to rephrase the passages you
BH> had in mind?

Yes, it doesn't say they are registered. It says which ones are in
active use currently.


>>Fourth, I see no compelling reason to register both "javascript"
>>and "ecmascript" variants;

I do - they are related but different languages. One is defined by an
international standards group and one ( a superset) by browser vendor.


-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris at w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group