Re: reason for application/iotp-xml (was RE: Registration of MIME med ia type APPLICATION/IOTP)

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

(It's a bad sign when it takes more than 15 seconds to trim off the Cc: 
list...)

At 01:00 PM 3/11/00 -0800, ned.freed@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > There are mechanisms in MIME to call out properties like this. Why
> > are we trying to embed this particular one in the name instead of
> > using the mechanisms that MIME provides?
>
> Because upon examination none of them seem even remotely correct for the task
> at hand. My conclusion is that if you want to do this, this is right way.

That's a big "if", particularly if you look at this application. Thank 
goodness we are finally talking about a real example of something that is 
formatted with XML, and are no longer postulating about "potential" 
applications.

IOTP is a trading protocol. It involves talking about money and 
descriptions and roles and promises. What possible value would there be to 
a recipient using a non-IOTP-aware program to have that program 
automatically hand the IOTP package to an XML parser? It's not like that 
automatic handoff will magically cause trade to happen when it wouldn't 
have before.

In the specific case of IOTP, the right thing for the receiving agent to do 
when it doesn't recognize application/iotp is to write the object out to 
disk and say "there is an object whose file name is <foo> waiting for you". 
The sender might even give a filename hint of "foo.xml". The recipient can 
then open that object up in whatever generic file opener they have.

To date, we have not seen anything formatted in XML that would be useful to 
automatically hand to an XML parser. If the parser knows about the type, it 
would have snagged it on receipt. All of these things would be just as 
useful being handed to a text viewer where the user can see "oh, this is 
XML and I have a tool that will format this nicely". (I imagine the same 
thing could be done for binary blobs to make a guess if you want to pass 
them through an ASN.1 dumper...)

I propose to leave the type application/iotp and to drop this discussion 
until there is a request for a real-world application where thre would be 
some advantage to the end user for application/foo-xml to be handed to an 
XML viewer directly instead of being written to disk.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium