| Re: [m2m-iwg] M2M Media Type? |
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Great questions, let me try and clarify: The Media Type is supposed to give enough information to the receiver to properly handle a piece of data. In this instance when I say 'handle' I do not mean that the receiver simply knows how to deserialize the
data, but rather that the Media Type indicates how the receiver should (1) deserialize the data, (2) lookup an appropriate handler, and (3) interpret the data. Presently, you are correct. The common use case of a Media Type is to designate how a piece of data ought to stored and represented, generally for a user or web service to consume; for example 'application/json'
indicates JSON content and 'application/xml' indicates XML content, however, the failure of using just 'application/json' or any of the other generic Media Type's is that they do not tell the receiver if it is information it can handle; instead the receiver
must actually begin to process the data to discover that information. However, Media Types can be more granular and there is definitely a school of thought in the ReST world at least that Media Type's should be domain specific. In the M2M world we would do well to define certain
data types that could be represented under a common M2M Media Type. Rather than sending an arbitrary JSON payload to or from a device identified as 'application/json' what if we could use 'm2m/sensor-record+json' to indicate that the data is key/value pairing
sent from a sensor and that it is represented in JSON? Hopefully that clears up some confusion... - PL From: m2m-iwg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:m2m-iwg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Nicholas Humfrey I am not quite clear what the purpose of this would be? Normally media types are associated with specific file formats, not intended purpose?
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