* Sean Leonard <dev+i...@seantek.com> [2014-11-12 00:50]: > At least one commentator (Larry Masinter) specifically requested that > the variant identifier be included in-band in the Markdown content, > rather than as part of the metadata. I disagree with in-band signaling > (as has been registered earlier on this list).
Both have value. Ruby’s postulate: The accuracy of metadata is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the data and the metadata. That is to say, a value signalled in-band will be correct much more often than one signalled via MIME/HTTP headers. Also, in-band vs out-of-band simply address different scenarios. An in-band signal travels with the data automatically, without any special measures taken, whereas out-of-band metadata has a fair chance of getting lost somewhere in transit. How is a user agent supposed to store the variant parameter from the content-type after downloading a Markdown file to disk? But if you want to make decisions about the data during transit, having to parse the payload to find the signal is prohibitively expensive. An out-of-band signal is cheap, and is visible to a lot of infrastructure that would never implement such specialised parsing of payloads such as Markdown. (I mean, that is the exact same reason for having a MIME type separate from text/plain in the first place.) It’s nonsensical to portray this as a binary choice between two options. Those are two separate choices and discussions. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/> _______________________________________________ Markdown-Discuss mailing list Markdown-Discuss@six.pairlist.net https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss