TAP 1.0: Substantive comments.

[Francois Ochsenbein]

>
>On Mon, 31 Aug 2009, Tom McGlynn wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>> My concern here is that I don't think the document makes it clear
>
>A similar issue is the MIME type issue (MIME type of the query
>response votable) which was never resolved.  Currently we allow either
>"text/xml" or "application/x-votable+xml" to be returned without
>specifying a default.  We want to be able to return either, but there
>should be a well defined default, probably text/xml.  Otherwise if we
>execute a TAP query from a browser interface it will work correctly
>(render and display the returned table) for some services, but fail
>(prompt for a file save) for other services.  This will set a trap
>with the application behaving unreliably, forcing client apps to
>specify the desired MIME type with a FORMAT parameter.
>
>Instead we should specify MIME="text/xml" as the default behavior while
>allowing use of FORMAT to force return of the application MIME type.
>Hence for example a query would render in the browser by default
>(as for all our current data services) but a Web query form could
>have a button to optionally direct the query response to an external
>application such as TOPCAT under control of the browser application
>associations.

Well, I tried to make this quite explicit in the PR version of
VOTable1.2 (section 7.3), and it tries to reflect our discussions
at the last interop meeting:

#In the HTTP protocol, the mime type is the value specified by the Content-Type:
#line. The recommended mime-type describing a VOTable document is
#application/x-votable+xml: the x- prefix indicates an experimental type, and is
#required for non-registered media types; and the +xml suffix (defined by RFC
#3023 section 7) indicates that the type describes a specialization of XML.
#
#However the text/xml mime type is acceptable for services delivering data which
#are expected to be visualized by humans in a browser; this mime type would
#preferably be associated with an XSL style sheet, for a presentation of
#well-formatted tables. It is expected that a few typical XSL style sheets will
#be accessible from the IVOA site.

Any disagreement wit this ?

Francois
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Francois Ochsenbein    ------   Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg
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