[topicmapmail] Should resourceData have a MIME type?

[Thomas B. Passin]

I have noticed that some people put markup into the resourceData element of
an occurrence.  One example is Kal Ahmed's nice topic map of the TM4J API.

This practice makes a lot of sense, but the application has no way to know
that one particular occurrence is going to have markup and another is not.
It is not always easy to detect markup, especially the type of the markup.

Presumably for a resourceRef, the application can find out the MIME type
when it retrieves the resource, but not so for resource data.

It would be clumsy to define different occurrence types to hold different
types of resource data.  It would be very complex to specify each instance
as being of some type that holds the right data type.

It would be very simple to add an optional attribute to resourceData that
would specify the MIME type.  Then my app could get an occurrence of Kal's
data, discover that it is intended to be HTML, and display it accordingly.
Even inline images could be included, along with the other MIME types.

This would be so useful and so simple - and backwards compatible - that I
urge its adoption in the next version of the ISO standard.

Note that RDF has a similar problem with the values of their literals.  They
tried to handle it with the "parsetype" attribute, but apparently they have
not gotten everything ironed out yet.

Thoughts, suggestions?

Cheers,

Tom P