Liaison statement
Registration of MIME media types

IANA received a request from David Singer on behalf of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 for a
media type registration for ISO/IEC 14496-12:2012. IANA passed the request on
to the Expert Reviewer for the media types registry, and the Expert raised a
concern regarding media subtype name. We, the Applications Area Directors for
the IESG, were asked to review the situation.

The name requested, "iso.segment", contains the character "." (U+002E). In
media type registrations, the "." character is reserved for facet prefixes and
is therefore not normally allowed in media subtype registrations that do not
contain a faceted name. We take this to have been a simple error, using "." as
a visual separator instead of for example the character "-" (U+002D), which is
used as a visual separator in several registrations. However, we also
understand that "iso.segment" is already in use as a media subtype, so changing
the name at this point would be a significant problem.

After some discussion with the Expert, we have concluded that registering a
single name with this character will not cause significant operational problems
and are willing to advise IANA to move ahead with the registration of the name
as an exception to the normal procedure. However, we do request that in the
future ISO/IETC JTC1 SC29 not attempt to register names which contain a "."
character that are not part of a faceted name.

We thank you for consideration of this.