PUBLIC MARKS with tag mimetype

Via Stefan, a proposal from the WSO2 gang for an approach to decentralizing media types and removing the requirement for the registration process.

In a plain HTTP interaction, the Content-type and Accept headers carry information about the type of the data being transmitted and accepted, respectively. You’ve seen these media types in numerous examples, e.g. a typical request or response might have a Content-type header with the value application/xml.

A significant weakness of HTTP in my view is its dependence on the MIME standard for media type identification and on the related iana registry. This registry is a limited bottleneck that does not have the capacity to deal with the media type definition requirements of individual enterprises or domains. Machine-centric environments rely in a higher level of semantics than the human-centric environment of the Web. In order for machines to effectively exploit information, every unique schema of information needs to be standardised in a media type and for those media types to be individually identified. The number of media types grows as machines become more dominant in a distributed computing environment and as the number of distinct environments increases.