-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 61
New issue
Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.
By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.
Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account
Replaced "MIME media type" with the recommended terminology: "media type" #639
base: main
Are you sure you want to change the base?
Conversation
"MIME type" is the way the media type is most commonly referred to, and the name that is most recognizable to developers, so I wonder if maybe we should retain it as a parenthetical in some cases e.g. in the first reference say something like |
I don't have data on which term is most recognizable. However, "media type" has been recommended by IANA for about three decades. I suspect developers are familiar with both terms, and I also believe that developers from the mid-90s onward, as well as those implementing these specifications, would be fine with using just "media type". In the first instance, I've included a reference that I think should suffice: "media type ([IANA-MEDIA-TYPES])". |
Just to pick a different server-side ecosystem at random, in Ruby, the main
library most developers use is called Mime::Type, and the Rails docs refer
to "MIME content-type" when explaining how to set a custom Content-Type
header:
https://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#the-content-type-option.
So I think we have good evidence that the term is still very widespread. I
think having an "aka" or "formerly known as" clarifier the first time the
term is used is a very small ask that would help improve the experience of
implementers significantly.
|
ActivityPub doesn't use "MIME", yet that worked out fine with the developers? |
This PR is a class 2 change updating the following documents: