Re: Announcement of a new I-D

[Chris Lilley <chris@xxxxxx>]

muraw3c@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> From: Dave Peterson <davep@xxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Announcement of a new I-D
> Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 13:11:29 -0400
> 
> > At 1:37 AM +0900 5/10/00, muraw3c@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> >
> > >At the ietf-822 mailing list, Keith Moore [1] pointed out that "-" is
> > >already used too heavily by existing media types.  Chris Newman [2]
> > >suggested ~!$^+{}| We picked |
> >
> > One of the others would have had the advantage that it doesn't look like
> > another character (e.g., Cap I and/or lower case L in san-serif) in any
> > common fonts.
> 
> Which one do you strongly recommend?  It is not too late.

Well if it is not too late, I would very much like to see the separator
altered back to "-".

The trailing string "-xml" does not occur, as you say, in any registered
MIME types. The frequency of "-" or indeed of "x" "m" and "l" elsewhere in
registered types is irrelevant. the bare symbol "-" was not being proposed
as a separator al by itself. 

It was the terminal string "-xml" which, as you point out, is unused in any
existing MIME type and thus there is no possibility of confusion.

However, SVG is getting close to finished and we would like a stable naming
system to use. The latest SVG last call working draft in fact stated that
the MIME type for SVG would be registered as "image/svg-xml". If the
trailing string is altered to "|xml" then the SVG WG has to choose between
moving to the new preferred syntax, or staying with the old one and loosing
any semantic about general XML processing.

--
Chris