IPP Mail Archive: IPP> Re: MOD - Proposed application/ipp registration text

IPP> Re: MOD - Proposed application/ipp registration text

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Sun, 12 Oct 1997 22:10:13 PDT

I've been thinking about this, also in the light of
comments made in some other internet media type registration
discussions, and I've come to the conclusion that it is
probably a bad idea to rely on the 'charset' attribute of
the 'application/ipp' media type *or* the content-language
attribute of the enclosing MIME message.

While those are the conventional ways of specifying the language
and charset of media types which are not self-contained,
that in fact (as was pointed out by others) it's pretty
unreliable, since the MIME headers can get separated from
the entity body. It's a stopgap for those types like
text/plain which have no other place to put the information.

Since you're defining application/ipp from scratch, this
rule doesn't apply.

On the other hand, it baffles me to try to construct a realistic
scenario where there will be many different charset parameters
for different strings in a single application/ipp message.
Why not just have some part of the wrapper define the default
charset for the entire message?

> It is NOT reasonable to transfer IPP requests and their
> correlated responses via email - they are synchronous and
> have no correlators, as the model and protocol are written.

Email itself has a correlator, mainly the message-id and
in-reply-to link. I send you a message with a message-id, and
you reply with an in-reply-to header. It's pretty clumsy,
I'll admit.

Larry

-- 
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter