Open up the state property for extension

[hamnis]

Could one think of the state value like link relations?

You could for instance have a initial registry, like other media types have done.

Then you could allow that a state might be a full uri, menaning that we could forge new state properties without having to update the media-type.

What do you think?

[darrelmiller]

@mamund made a similar suggestion to me. I'm concerned by opening up the status value to be extensible that I will lose the semantics of the media type. What does a user agent do with a status that it doesn't understand? I see these statuses as being more like HTTP Status Codes. Pick the one that is closest to the one you want and add a link that points to more specifics if necessary.

I'd love to hear about potential statuses that don't fit in one of the existing buckets. I agree that some user agents may like to have more details, but I think links can be added for clients to discover those extra details. I think there is value in forcing users of the media type to shoehorn their status into a more general category, to enable generic client code to act on those statuses. Allowing extensible statuses may just encourage people to invent their own set of statuses that overlap with the existing terms because a preference in terminology. That would definitely defeat my goals.

I'm open to being proved wrong on this.