Scripting Media Types

[Bruce Lilly]

On Wed February 9 2005 16:46, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Bruce Lilly wrote:
> >You might say something like "there exist some non-MIME-compliant
> >applications that generate unregistered, non-private-use labels
> >such as 'text/javascript'  ...  such use is clearly not interoperable".
> 
> Would such a statement address your concerns in this regard, or do you
> mean wording such as "support" as you've mentioned, "the media type
> application/ecmascript", etc. should still be replaced even if I adopt
> this proposal?

My principal objection is to inappropriate use of text (image, video,
audio, model) discrete types.  I have no objection to registration
under the application discrete media type.  For that matter, there
are a number of scripting languages that have no registered media
tags ((Bourne) shell (and descendants), awk, sed, perl, python, etc.),
and all of them share certain similarities which are distinct from
the bulk of application types (which are primarily data used by
some software, as opposed to *being* software); there might well be
a rare opportunity to register a media type category for scripting
[I am not officially proposing that; I mention it only for the sake
of completeness].
 
> But why does that require the reference to be normative rather than
> informative?

A rule of thumb is that if a reference's relevant content were to
change, and that would result in some change to an implementation of
a media type handler, then that reference is almost certainly
normative.  If the reference is solely for illustrative purposes,
it is informative.