Ever wanted to define your own media type? application/json just not doing it
for you? application/xhtml+xml got you down with its strictness? Well, you
can show the W3C who's boss!
A nice pretty template to start filling out all the deets.
Simple, HTML5 markup. Pretty CSS. Pre-made sections. It's all here.
Often, making use of a new media type is the first step in building a Hypermedia API, and it's always kinda annoying. You should really publish your spec, but then you have to write all this HTML. And writing HTML sucks.
Yeah! After you define a type, you should register it with the IANA. That's the next step towards making it a standard.
So your webservice lets you do something cool with Widgets online. So you make
application/vnd.foocorp.widgets+json. You register it with the IANA, and it
goes under the vendor tree.
Then some other company comes along, and they also do sweet things with
Widgets. They ideally will work with you on making the media type applicable
to both themselves and you.
Widgets are sweet, so pretty soon, an entire group of companies uses the
application/vnd.foocorp.widgets+json media type. Pretty sweet! But foocorp
isn't really special anymore here. We're all working together on this. So then
you make an RFC for application/widgets+json, and now it's a global standard.
Congrats! You're an awesome Internet citizen!