Subject: Thought experiment

From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 22:03:54 -0700

Flash forward a few months; Atom 1.0 is done, lots of implementations 
are out there, everybody's happy, and big-time deployment starts.  So, 
how are Atom feeds going to get deployed?  I see the following common 
cases:

1. They'll be deployed by competent people who know how things work, 
and served as application/atom+xml
2. They'll be served by people who don't know that stuff or don't 
control their web server, and:
2.a. they'll be named whatever.atom, and based on Apache's defaults, 
end up being served as text/plain, or
2.b they'll be named whatever.xml and based on Apache's defaults, end 
up being served as text/xml, unless
2.c they have a really recent Apache, in which case they'll be served 
as application/xml

<sidenote>People of Earth to Greg Stein: could we change the Apache 
default media type for ".atom" to "application/atom+xml" ASAP, like 
right now, as a gesture in the right direction?</sidenote>

So, the question we face, in the context of PaceMustBeWellFormed and 
PaceShouldBeWellFormed, is "how big a problem do we have?"  I.e. how 
many feeds end up in 2.a or 2.b above?  In the case of RSS, it's pretty 
ugly, see Mark's numbers: 
http://imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg05588.html.

I wonder if we could convince ourselves that if we mounted a really 
vigorous publicity campaign, i.e. we all agree, for the next few 
months, whenever we're talking to a co-worker or a journo or from a 
conference stage, to say never say "Atom" without, within the next 45 
seconds, also saying "which as we all know must be served as 
application/atom+xml or it won't work"; I wonder, as I say, if we all 
did that, whether the proportion in categories 2.a and 2.b above might 
be small enough that we could not worry about it?  -Tim

---

From: Greg Stein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 03:56:33 -0700

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 10:03:54PM -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
>...

The mime.types that is shipped with Apache derives its information from
two places: the IANA, and (apparently) some standardized W3C types. I
don't know where Roy got the W3C list to incorporate, but will follow up
(and report back here).

In short, it has to appear in one of those two places for it to be in the
mime.types file.

Note that the rules for IANA registration are covered under RFC 2048. A
brief glance over that appears that we'd need to be an RFC *first* instead
of just an I-D.

Of course, that is rather painful if the Apache file waits for the RFC --
there would be a huge lag between when the type is settled in the spec
process, when you really want to have it pushed out to users, and when it
is finally published by the IANA. IOW, the pragmatic choice is for Apache
to be optimistic/pragmatic: assume success and jam that in there today.
Let me chat with Roy; I'm going to assume we can simply refer to section 8
of our I-D as "sufficient", then remove the special quotation once the
IANA publishes.

Cheers,
-g

---

From: Mark Pilgrim <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 09:21:22 -0400

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 22:03:54 -0700, Tim Bray <[email-masked]> wrote:
> PaceShouldBeWellFormed, is "how big a problem do we have?"

Early adopters (hosted providers):

$ lynx -head -dump http://chrisaralex.blogspot.com/atom.xml | grep Content-Type
Content-Type: text/xml

$ lynx -head -dump
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/feed/msgs.xml |
grep Content-Type
Content-Type text/xml

$ lynx -head -dump http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/data/atom |
grep Content-Type
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

$ lynx -head -dump http://mena.typepad.com/dollarshort/atom.xml | grep
Content-Type
Content-Type: application/xml

Early adopters (tools):

$ lynx -head -dump http://wordpress.org/development/feed/ | grep Content-Type
Content-Type: text/xml

$ lynx -head -dump http://www.movabletype.org/index.xml | grep Content-Type
Content-Type: text/xml

$ lynx -head -dump http://www.sixapart.com/log/index.rdf | grep Content-Type
Content-Type: text/plain

$ lynx -head -dump http://www.textism.com/?atom=1 | grep Content-Type
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8

Other notable tools:

$ lynx -head -dump http://blogs.sun.com/roller/rss/tbray | grep Content-Type
Content-Type: text/xml

$ lynx -head -dump http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/Rss.aspx | grep
Content-Type
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

$ lynx -head -dump
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog_rss.jspa?blog=351
| grep Content-Type
Content-Type: text/xml

-- 
Cheers,
-Mark

---

From: Greg Stein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 12:51:28 -0700

> don't know where Roy got the W3C list to incorporate, but will follow up

The W3C types were done ad-hoc since the W3C folks were not good about
registering their types with the IANA. They also don't have any kind
of single registry, so Roy just did a bunch of searches. Apparently,
the W3C has revamped their registration process to lose their internal
roadblocks, but that doesn't really matter here.

> of our I-D as "sufficient", then remove the special quotation once the

Yup. Roy had the same thoughts: if a MIME type appears in an I-D and
it contains an IANA registration section (like our sectoin 8), then
Apache should go ahead and put it into the mime.types file for our
distributions.

I've gone ahead and done this: the application/atom+xml (for .atom)
type will appear in our next releases (Apache 1.3.32 and Apache
2.0.51), whenever those come out.

Cheers,
-g

---

From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:05:43 -0700

> roadblocks, but that doesn't really matter here.

Heh, and in the halls at the W3C you hear griping at how incredibly 
slow, painful, and non-deterministic it is to register a type.  Last 
time Roy was in the room he got mad and said "no, you're just not 
trying."  I have no idea who's right but you're correct that 
registration of W3C-generated data types has been *very* sluggish.

> 2.0.51), whenever those come out.

Thanks on behalf of the community -Tim

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 18:29:44 +0900

At 13:05 04/07/15 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:

>Heh, and in the halls at the W3C you hear griping at how incredibly slow, 
>painful, and non-deterministic it is to register a type.  Last time Roy 
>was in the room he got mad and said "no, you're just not trying."

I have to agree with Roy here.

>I have no idea who's right but you're correct that registration of 
>W3C-generated data types has been *very* sluggish.

I keep a page at http://www.w3.org/2002/06/registering-mediatype.html,
with detailled instructions, and a list of types and their status in
the registration process as far as I know it.

Regards,    Martin.