microformats2-mime-type

This page is for discussing the potential benefits and disadvantages of registering a MIME type for microformats2 canonical JSON resulting from a microformats2-parsing implementation.

ℹ️ Note: This page is historical from ~2015. Please see and comment on the GitHub issue:
https://github.com/microformats/microformats2-parsing/issues/52

Potential MIME types

Note: None of these are officially registered MIME types. Until the IETF registers the MIME type, it is not official.

• application/microformats+json
• application/microformats2+json
• application/mf2+json
  • Appears to have some adoption in the wild: https://indieweb.org/application/mf2+json
• application/uf2+json

Advantages

• if a user is using content negotiation, one URL can have both a microformats2 JSON representation (which is simply the parsed content of what the text/html or application/xhtml+xml view contains) and a site or domain specific JSON representation of their own (commonly used for APIs)
• it provides a naming structure for other future formats that have (close to) bidirectional conversion support with the semantics of JSON (e.g. YAML, BSON, Apache Avro, Thrift) - we cannot assume that JSON will be around forever or that it will suit all use cases even if it seems like it currently is the best choice

Disadvantages

• some HTTP libraries (e.g. Python's requests library) will use application/json to auto-parse JSON, but the routine that auto-parses JSON will not be activated on custom MIME types

See also

• microformats2
• microformats2-parsing