Scripting Media Types

Sat Feb 12 20:31:58 CET 2005

* ned.freed at mrochek.com wrote:
>The fact that these subtypes of text are in widespread use leads me to suggest
>an alternate approach: Why not register them, but mark them as obsolete with a
>pointer to the type that should be used instead? The registration will then
>serve two purposes: To make it clear what the types contain when they are used
>and to also make it clear they should no longer be used. 

The draft states that text/ecmascript is expected to be deprecated in a
future version of the document. This basically means text/ecmascript
should not be used in a context where application/ecmascript could be
used as well. Marking text/ecmascript as obsolete does not allow making
such a distinction as far as I can tell, and I think the registration
should acknowledge that users of the types do not have much of a choice
at the moment.

Consider for example <http://validator.w3.org/> which I help to develop;
it currently only offers SGML DTD validation but we are planning to add
features to report other errors and provide warnings e.g. in cases where
a specification states something SHOULD NOT be done. Marking a media
type as obsolete would basically mean that it SHOULD NOT be used, so it
would be reasonable to for a document like

  <!DOCTYPE html ...>
  ...
  <script type="text/ecmascript">
  ...

to generate a warning like

  Warning: use application/ecmascript instead of text/ecmascript

That's however not a reasonable suggestion at the moment. So maybe I
should add text such as "Use of text/ecmascript in a context where
application/ecmascript could be used as well is discouraged" to make
this clearer?
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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