Re: Well-formedness statistics

[Antone Roundy <antone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, June 23, 2004, at 05:06  PM, MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given) 
wrote:
> The most authoritative documents are MIME RFCs.  RFC 2045 says:
...
>    The Content-Type header field specifies the nature of the data in 
> the
>    body of an entity by giving media type and subtype identifiers, and
>    by providing auxiliary information that may be required for certain
>    media types.  After the media type and subtype names, the remainder
>    of the header field is simply a set of parameters, specified in an
>    attribute=value notation.

It occurred to me upon reading this that we might wish to specify some 
(optional?) parameters to the application/atom+xml media type.  From 
just a little farther down in RFC 2045:

   Parameters may be required by their
   defining content type or subtype or they may be optional.

So doing so is certainly allowed.  The one idea that comes to my mind 
that might be useful would be an Atom version number or string.  For 
example:

Content-Type: application/atom+xml; charset=UTF-8; version=1.0

I'm not sure whether I personally would find this useful for anything I 
do, but I seem to recall someone mentioning that they'd like to be able 
to differentiate between versions without having to look inside the XML 
itself for some reason.

So if this idea appeals to someone out there, be aware that I'm not 
likely to write up a proposal for it!

Antone