VOTable enhancement (easy)

[Mark Taylor]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2021, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> Hi Pat,
> 
> I think the "easy" is a bit over-optimistic here, since:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 08:43:00AM -0700, Patrick Dowler wrote:
> > Over in the DataLink discussions about adding params to other content-type
> > values (eg in the content_type column), we found out that this really goes
> > against the spirit of the mime type RFC 2045 and that params should be
> > defined by the spec that owns the type. So, this is a request for VOTable
> > to add an allowed mime type parameter content that other specs can define
> > values for. It would thus be open ended but clients would know to
> 
> ...for all I know you can't write a specification for x- media types,
> which are only intended for internal or temporary use.

I don't see why you can't, if it's x- you can do what you want with it.
And indeed we already have: the optional "serialization" parameter
of application/x-votable+xml is already defined in Section 8 of
VOTable 1.4, and I take it that Pat is just asking to add new text
in that section defining an additional "content" parameter.
For what it's worth, that doesn't sound problematic to me.

> Hence, what we'd need to do is register a proper media type
> (application/votable+xml, I'd suspect).  Of course, we should have
> done that ages ago.  I'd still be happy to start that now if a few
> other people were on board.

Not that I'm attempting to dissuade you from that, though I don't
think in practice it's going to deliver any new benefits.

--
Mark Taylor  Astronomical Programmer  Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk          http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/