[topicmapmail] Wiki markup datatype and media types

[Murray Altheim]

Robert Cerny wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Two questions:
> 1) Is there a subject identifier in use for the Wiki markup datatype? If 
> not, does anybody have a recommendation of which URI to use?

I am not aware of any standardized datatype for wiki markup, as there
is no standard for wiki markup.

> 2) Does anybody use media types (mime types) as datatypes? Does anybody 
> see a reason why this might not be a good idea?

There's been advocacy over the years within the wiki community for a
wiki IMT/MIME type, but to my knowledge this has not been successfully
registered with IANA. I myself was at first advocating 'text/wiki' or
'text/x-wiki' (absent a registration) but upon re-reading RFC 2046
agreed with others in the discussions that 'application/*' was more
correct. Since there hasn't been a registration an 'x-' prefix is
warranted, and since there's a zillion wiki syntaxes and given useful
processing of the syntax is often necessary for presentation and/or
interpretation, a syntax suffix is probably warranted. It's that last
item that is problematic as that *should* be a URI identifier given a
URI provides a recognizable and verifiable namespace, but IMTs don't
provide for URIs, only string tokens. So in the end I'm using

   application/x-wiki+jspwiki

since I'm using JSPWiki and its syntax. There's no means of resolving
name conflicts but this isn't DNS, its the IANA and they don't want to
get into registering markup languages much less wiki application names.

There's no pretty way to convert an IMT to a URI without escaping the
slash or plus characters. Since a human-readable conversion from IMTs
to URIs isn't available, using IMTs for datatypes is problematic; when
expressed in attribute values, fine, but I believe you're looking for
a PSI. If we're willing to abuse the syntax a bit we can let the
existing slash pretend to be a directory delimiter and the plus sign
act in some unnamed-but-syntactically-valid role, our wiki IMT as above
then becomes something like:

    http://purl.org/ceryle/psi/imt/application/x-wiki+jspwiki

using some preexisting base URI/domain/namespace.

That's the scheme I'm using. I realize this isn't much of an answer but
hopefully somewhat helpful...

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray07 at altheim.com>                           ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

        In the evening
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        Rustle in the autumn wind
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