Revisiting mime-types and file extensions

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2007-06-15 à 19:49, Phil Mocek a écrit :


>> Specifically, what happens if I change the page URL to PHP

>> Markdown Extra some day?

>

> You'll create many broken links, causing trouble for everyone

> who has ever linked to your page.  Please don't do that.


Redirection can handle older links fine. The question is: will people  
begin to use the new URL as the profile? will tools need to be aware  
the two URLs are aliases? Note that this is already a problem since  
there is *two* URLs for that page, one with "www" in the domain and  
one without.

The general idea is that the name is likely to be meaningful longer  
than the URL. I can't guaranty the URL will hold indefinitely; bad  
things happen sometime. But Markdown Extra, the syntax's name,  
already has it's own [Wikipedia entry][1]. It's also much easier to  
remember "Markdown Extra" -- or "text/x-markdown.extra" -- than a URL  
and the syntax for writing the profile attribute in the MIME type.

  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown_Extra

If you really want a unique and permanent URI, I can probably arrange  
things so that something like this:

     http://michelf.com/ref/markdown-extra

can refer to the relevant documents, as long as I maintain my site.  
That'd be mostly the same as what the W3C does for XML namespaces:  
put a document at that URL that points to the related specifications.

But as I said, I don't really see the point in using a URL: it's much  
more cumbersome for not much added benefit.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/