Request for input: text/markdown media type

Murray S. Kucherawy (sent by Sean Leonard)
Wed, 24 Sep 2014 05:39:13 -0000

[Sent by Sean Leonard]
From: IETF Applications Area Working Group (APPSAWG)

To: markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net
<mailto:markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net>
jgm at berkeley.edu <mailto:jgm at berkeley.edu>
david at meteor.com <mailto:david at meteor.com>
vicent at github.com <mailto:vicent at github.com>
neil at reddit.com <mailto:neil at reddit.com>
ben at stackexchange.com <mailto:ben at stackexchange.com>
jatwood at codinghorror.com <mailto:jatwood at codinghorror.com>
comments at daringfireball.net <mailto:comments at daringfireball.net>

Cc: presnick at qti.qualcomm.com <mailto:presnick at qti.qualcomm.com>
barryleiba at computer.org <mailto:barryleiba at computer.org>

Response Contact: superuser at gmail.com <mailto:superuser at gmail.com>

Technical Contact: superuser at gmail.com <mailto:superuser at gmail.com>
dev+ietf at seantek.com <mailto:dev%2Bietf at seantek.com>

Purpose: Request for input

Attachments: (none)

Body:

The Applications Area Working Group (APPSAWG) of the Internet
Engineering  Task Force (IETF) has taken up a proposed work item to
register a new Media Type, "text/markdown", for the purposes of
identifying content in the Markdown format.  The current version of the
document can be viewed here:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-appsawg-text-markdown/

We know Sean Leonard approached the Markdown community about starting
this work previously (see
http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2014-July/thread.html) and
some of the questions that were discussed in that thread are also being
asked in the working group.  In the interests of ensuring that any
choices we make will not conflict with the positions and course of the
Markdown community, APPSAWG would like to solicit feedback on a few
important questions.

Part of the impetus here is that an unregistered and unspecified media
type ?text/x-markdown? appears to be in use.  This work seeks to
formalize this use and register the name.

Our questions for the Markdown community:

(1) We understand there is not a standard Markdown format, but rather a
number of variants based on one original proposal. This leads us to
wonder how a consumer would be expected to interpret this media type
once it is registered.  Typically, a media type registration includes a
reference to a single, stable, definition document, but we are not aware
of such a thing for Markdown.  Can or should this work proceed without one?

Note that the IETF has no intention to undertake the work of publishing
an RFC that contains a Markdown syntax or otherwise blessing any
particular Markdown variant, or calling one of them ?standard".  Any
Markdown definition document(s) would be referenced by this work and
would be external to the IETF.

(2) One proposal to address this issue is to include a parameter that
indicates which flavor of Markdown should be applied in order to
translate the input when the media type is encountered.  For example:

Content-Type: text/markdown; flavor="foobar"

This would likely necessitate a registry of known variants and their
respective defining documents so that a consumer has implementation
guidance.  This puts some burden on the Markdown community to begin
formally documenting and registering all of its variants that might use
this media type.

(3) The solution in (2) above further raises the question of whether
there should be a default variant (i.e., what to do if no ?flavor?
clause is present), and if so, which one should be the default.  If
there is no default, then how should a consumer interpret the absence of
the ?flavor" tag?

(4) At the same time, it has been observed that regardless of which
variant is in use as input, any Markdown processor will generally
produce something useful as output.  Given this, is it necessary to know
the ?flavor? in use at all?  Put another way: Rather than being
concerned with variants, should "text/markdown" merely be a hint to
consumers that the content is in some Markdown variant, and beyond that,
caveat implementer?

(5) Does the Markdown community have any alternative suggestions in
response to any of these questions?

We look forward to your replies, hopefully within the next several
weeks, which can be sent to the response and technical contacts listed
in the header of this liaison.  Markdown community participants are also
invited to subscribe and reply to apps-discuss at ietf.org
<mailto:apps-discuss at ietf.org> in order to address the entire working
group directly.


M. Kucherawy
for the Applications Area Working Group, IETF