Re: ATOM representation of search result facets

hello mark.

On Sep 5, 2012, at 8:09, Mark Baker <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Rushforth, Peter
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> My understanding is that application/atom+xml describes atom *without*
>> extensions.  If you put extensions in,
>> to *any media type*, via either new markup or even changing the meaning of
>> standard atom markup, you should change media types,
>> because it is the media type which names / describes the preferred
>> semantics of the message, and it is
>> the message metadata which is the most authoritative on the web:
> That's not the case. It may well be the case for some - text/plain
> comes to mind - but the majority of widely used media types are
> designed well enough to accommodate non-breaking extensions (where
> their introduction doesn't affect the meaning of the core content).

very well put! my rule of thumb is: if the content "makes sense" in the more generic type, use that one and make the extension semantics as easy to detect as possible (and "profile" is an attempt to provide such an easy way, reusable across media types). if the content is pretty much incomprehensible (such as RDF/XML served as application/xml), it provides little value (or even misleads clients) to even mention the more generic underlying media type. so far, it seems to me that this gives you a good starting point to decide how you want to satisfy the "self-describing" constraint.

cheers,

dret.