Markdown Media Type Registration

[Robert Sayre]

Aaron Swartz wrote:
> 
>>I'm curious as to why and when this would be used in the context of
>>Atom. For the publishing API?
> 
> 
> I would presume so; it seems like a useful standardized way to
> communicate to various weblog publishers and editors that "this post
> is in X format" so they know how to convert it to HTML on their end.
> 

Exactly. It's like that Markdown option in MT, but you can send it over 
the network.

> 
>>Would I use it instead of "text/plain" to serve up my
>>Markdown-formatted plaintext web archives. E.g.:
>>
>>  <http://daringfireball.net/2004/11/audion_story.text>
> 
> 
> Yep. Since it's a subtype of text, browsers should display it as a
> text file just the same.

Here's a markdown file served with text/x.vnd.markdown:

http://atompub.org/2004/11/21/syntax.markdown

Firefox pops up a dialog, MSIE 6 guesses that it's HTML (also does this 
with text/plain). YMMV. Registration of a MIME type doesn't mean that 
you *must* serve the doc with that media type. The bonus is that it 
makes it easy for apps to positively identify when they're using 
Markdown: usually in authoring scenarios.

Take a look at http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/. You 
can get an idea of what the application should look like. It's not a 
whole lot of writing. You should probably run it by the ietf-types [0] 
mailing list to make sure you haven't made some procedural mistake. I 
confess to knowing only slightly more than you do about the process, but 
Aaron has successfully registered a media type (RFC 3870), so he might 
be able to help you more than myself.

Robert Sayre

[0] http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-types