Mark Nottingham suggests the W3C should take it upon themselves to clean up the media type registration process. I sort of concur, in that the official registration procedure doesn’t explain in sufficient detail how the burden of managing the timeline is entirely registrant-driven. This caused lots of delay during the registration of RFC 3236.
But on the other hand, I like it when centralized registries are difficult to use. If there’s really a need for a bazillion different data formats, then a centralized registry is the wrong approach, and the difficulty of using it – multipled by the number of people experiencing it – should provide sufficient impetus for somebody to suggest a change to a decentralized process.
Of course, I don’t believe we need a bazillion different data formats. I think we have a perfectly good 80% solution, which is why I’m not spearheading any efforts in this direction – though I think it would still be useful (just not required) to decentralize media types.
P.S. here’s an amusing data point, where Roy takes the W3C to task over its inability to properly register media types.
[…] Update; here’s an older position of mine. […]