Subject: [apps-discuss] Proposed charter for arcmedia

From: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 17:02:51 -1000

Some text I threw together for a possible arcmedia charter.  Feel free to
hack on it.

Also, if anyone is interested in participating in the management of this
working group, please let Barry know.  It is likely at this point that this
will be a short-lived working group which will never actually meet.

--- snip ---

There has been recent work to register media types for archive formats such
as “tar” (a POSIX standard format).  There are already several similar
media types for archive formats, such as “gzip” and “zip” (see, for
example, RFC6713), all of which are registered under the top-level media
type “application”.

We create top-level media types only rarely, only with Standards Track
RFCs, and only when one or more media types get special (or common, in the
case of more than one) handling that does not fit under an existing
top-level media type.  RFC6838 defines this process.

This working group will create an “archive” top-level media type in a
Standards Track document, using draft-seantek-kerwin-arcmedia-type as its
initial input.  It will specify rules for registering subtypes under that
new top-level type.  All of the usual things will be considered, including
type suffixes, fragment identifiers, and internationalization.

Either in that same document or in a second one, it will produce an initial
set of registrations under the new top-level media type.

The main document will include an Implementation Status section, described
by RFC6982, to record known projects that will either produce or consume
content using the new media type.  If by the first milestone there appears
to be no implementations of the new media type expected, the working group
will fold having produced no RFCs.

No other work is in scope for this working group.

Milestones:
- June 2015: Base document
- December 2015: Registrations document (if separate)