Subject: [apps-discuss] Applications Area Directorate Review of draft-levine-application-gzip-02

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 May 2012 10:32:10 +0200

I have been selected as the Applications Area Directorate reviewer for 
this draft (for background on appsdir, please see 
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/app/trac/wiki/ApplicationsAreaDirectorate).

Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call comments 
you may receive. Please wait for direction from your document shepherd 
or AD before posting a new version of the draft.

Document: draft-levine-application-gzip-02
Title: The application/zlib and application/gzip media types
Reviewer: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Review Date: 2012-05-05
IETF Last Call Date: from 2012-05-03 to 2012-05-31
IESG Telechat Date: -

Summary: This document defines media types for gzip and zlib 
compression. It is ready for publication with minor editorial issues.

Major Issues: None.

Minor Issues:

The document needs an IANA Considerations Section. That Section could 
either contain the registration templates, or just reference them.

In the actual templates, I recommend the following changes:

"Published specification:" - I would make these pointers to Sections 2 
and 3 of draft-levine-application-gzip; referencing the base specs 
directly here would mean that draft-levine-application-gzip doesn't get 
referenced in the media types registry at all.

"Encoding considerations": 
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4288#section-4.8> says this should one of 
"7bit", "8bit", "framed", or "binary". So maybe change to:

"binary - needs base64 or other encoding that allows arbitrary binary 
data when transmitted over non-binary transports"

(or just say "binary").

Best regards, Julian

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 May 2012 10:40:32 +0200

On 2012-05-05 10:32, Julian Reschke wrote:
> ...

Forgot to mention: I did *not* check the correctness of the "magic 
number" field.

Best regards, Julian

---

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 5 May 2012 11:37:39 -0400

> "Published specification:" - I would make these pointers to Sections 2 and 3
> of draft-levine-application-gzip; referencing the base specs directly here
> would mean that draft-levine-application-gzip doesn't get referenced in the
> media types registry at all.

I think it's OK the way it is.  Look at RFC 3778 which defines 
application/pdf.  Its published spec is the Adobe reference books, but the 
media registry entry refers to the RFC.  Most RFCs that register media 
types also define the media so they point to themselves, but the few that 
don't point to the base specs.

Other than that, I agree with your comments, and the next version will
reflect them.

I also checked the magic numbers, added a sentence to describe the
checksum in the first two bytes of a zlib file.

Regards, John