Comments regarding draft-freed-mime-p4-04.txt

[Mark Nottingham <mark.nottingham@bea.com>]

I have been asked to comment on draft-freed-mime-p4-04 as the person in 
the W3C's XML Protocols Working Group (XMLP) primarily responsible for 
shepherding the registration of the "application/soap+xml" media type.

First of all, let me say that I believe that the general approach taken 
in draft-freed-mime-p4-04 will greatly assist other, non-IETF standards 
organisations in the registration of their media types.

However, I do have some concerns with the present draft's lack of 
clarity regarding the timing of such registrations.

In particular, at what point should a standards organisation contact 
the IESG regarding registration? Section 3.1.1 states that 
"Registrations in the standards tree MUST be approved by the IESG and 
MUST correspond to a formal publication by a recognized standards 
body." Does "formal" imply "final" here, or should earlier drafts be 
submitted for feedback? Also, some indication of how one determines 
what are "recognized standards bod[ies]" would be helpful to those 
unfamiliar with the IETF.

Additionally, some indication of the expected processing time (or, 
ideally, service guarantees) would help other standards organisations 
in planning (especially if the media type registration is required 
before a document can be considered final; this might lead to an 
unfortunate catch-22 situation).

The resolution of the issues above, as applied to 
draft-freed-mime-p4-04, would have greatly helped XMLP in its 
registration of "application/soap+xml" (and I hope that it will assist 
us in our future registration(s)).

While reviewing the draft, I also noticed that in Section 3.5, 
"index.html" is not necessary, and implies (to many people) a specific 
format and (to many Web servers) a particular implementation. 
Considering the likely longevity of this as an RFC, I'd suggest 
"http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/";.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment,

--
Mark Nottingham   Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO   BEA Systems