Re: [dita] mime type for DITA?

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>]

Erik Hennum wrote:
> Hi, Paul:
> 
> Our tooling needs to download documents from a CMS and route requests to 
> open those documents to the client editor that understands DITA 
> specialization.
> 
> To do that, our tooling needs to distingish DITA topics and maps (with 
> base or specialized vocabularies) from other XML documents (XMI, SVG, 
> what have you) provided by the CMS system. The CMS stores the document 
> without an extension, so we can't rely on file-system mechanisms for 
> recognizing DITA vocabularies. If our tooling simply passes through the 
> document from the CMS to the client Operating System, we'll end up with 
> Internet Explorer opening the DITA topic instead of the DITA-aware 
> editor. Without a MIME type, our tooling will have to open and parse the 
> initial part of the file to recognize DITA topics and maps, which will 
> be very inefficient.
> 
> As I understand it, the scenario above is a standard rationale for MIME 
> types. I would expect the scenario above to be shared by other DITA 
> adopters who need close integration between a CMS and an authoring 
> environment.

We just discovered a similar issue with supporting WebDAV access to 
resources from our RSuite product, although in this case it was InDesign 
documents: InDesign would not recognize a resource as an InDesign 
document unless the MIME type was InDesign specific, even when the 
resource URI included the appropriate extension.

So I can see that it could be useful to distinguish DITA content from 
all other XML content (although in the scenario Erik outlines, that 
wouldn't help anybody who was trying to edit any other XML content--that 
seems like either a design flaw in the underlying CMS system or a client 
configuration issue).

Cheers,

Eliot

-- 
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
Main: 610.631.6770
www.reallysi.com
www.rsuitecms.com