[tei-council] [TEI-L] SV: TEI MIME type (fwd)

[David Sewell]

Technically our Feature Request is still open:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2856036&group_id=106328&atid=644065

Sigfrid made a stronger case in his recent email to TEI-L for
registering application/tei+xml than he had previously. Do we want to
revisit our decision not to pursue registration?

If so, I would suggest that we ask Sigfrid to supply us with the
information he thinks we would need to complete the IANA application (as
he seems to be familiar with the process), namely

http://www.iana.org/cgi-bin/mediatypes.pl

and then we could decide who to authorize as the "Author" of the
application.

David

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:05:26 +0100
From: Sigfrid Lundberg <slu at KB.DK>
To: TEI-L at listserv.brown.edu
Subject: [TEI-L] SV: TEI MIME type

The docbook mime type is documented in an internet draft

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-walsh-app-docbook-xml-00

it expired a year or so ago. Don't know why it wasn't renewed. Perhaps the work with XProc and Calabash too much time.

In general, an XML application is a document format defined using XML as opposed to applications that are processing XML documents which are xml processors. In my view TEI is an XML application. Mime types for XML applications are described in RFC3023 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3023), which clearly states that mime types like

application/mathml+xml

is the preferred form. There are also a discussion of this in the recommendation from the W3C "Architecture of the World Wide Web" (http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#xml-media-types)

These practices are now very much integrated in the REST design patterns for web applications. I'd like to take a few examples:

One could imagine that someone would like to publish TEI documents using the atom publishing protocol. That is explicitely prohibited for other text/* mime types except text/html. XML documents published using this protocol must be application/*+xml.

Consider the situation that we have the same content available through a REST web service, where the representation is chosen through the accept http header, then what if there are more than one XML representation, should TEI then use text/xml and docbook application/docbook+xml? Well, one could live with that, but harvesters that where not prepared for this in advance couldn't.

The TEI community is really good at XML, but a registered applicaiton/tei+xml would demonstrate to the world that we regard ourselves as a part of the Wordwide web as well.

Yours

Sigfrid





________________________________________
Fra: TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list [TEI-L at listserv.brown.edu] P&#229; vegne af Lou Burnard [lou.burnard at OUCS.OX.AC.UK]
Sendt: 21. november 2009 18:34
Til: TEI-L at listserv.brown.edu
Emne: Re: TEI MIME type

Council discussed this recently, and reached the conclusion that there
was no advantage (or indeed much sense) in registering a TEI-specific
MIME type. It's XML all the way down; not an application as such.

Piotr Bański wrote:
> Is there one?
>
> Docbook claims to have "application/docbook+xml", but I can't find it at
>  IANA:
>
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/
>
> So I'm not sure whether the absence of application/tei+xml or
> text/tei+xml or whatever ("tei-p5+xml"?) at IANA means that the TEI's
> type is not registered or maybe merely not listed there.
>
> Thanks,
>
>   Piotr