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Re: Text mime types

From: Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_btopenworld.com>
Date: 2005-06-13 18:56:52 CEST

Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2005-06-12 13:15:37 +0100, Julian Foad wrote:
>>Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>>>So, svn:mime-type should contain text/plain and there should be a way
>>>to specify the file encoding (compression scheme). "utf8" is not an
>>>encoding in the MIME sense.

I think there is some confusion between "file encoding" and "transfer encoding".

>>Hmm... I can't see how that would work in general. It could have
>>made sense in MIME's original context - attachments to email
>>messages - where the compression was perhaps temporary, to be
>>automatically undone at the end of the transfer, but I can't see
>>that making sense where MIME types are used more generally to
>>describe arbitrary files.
>
> The application could still perform the decompression

It _could_, but that would be a completely new and different feature. We are
not talking about that.

> One of the questions one may ask is how MIME types should be used by
> Subversion. An advantage of considering compression schemes not as
> MIME types is for svn diff for instance: the diff could be shown on
> the uncompressed file (as the may be unwanted or may be slow, this
> could be an option only).

Ditto.

I think the comment in Debian's /etc/mime.types is wrong and misleading and is
assuming that gzip (etc.) is only ever used as a content _transfer_ encoding.
Where no transfer (with its consequent automatic encoding and decoding) is
performed, the transfer encoding is inapplicable and we just want to state the
file content type. In this regard, "gzip" (MIME type probably
"application/x-gzip") is the outermost content type of a gzipped file.

- Julian

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Received on Mon Jun 13 19:00:50 2005

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