Re: MIME Type for SVG images in SVN config

Jan Hendrik wrote:
> Concerning Re: MIME Type for SVG images in SVN
> Kevin Grover wrote on 20 Jun 2008, 14:58, at least in part:
>
>> Sorry to keep beating this dead horse, but I felt the need to point
>> that while MIME is the _standard_ for file intended usage. It is
>> _not_ the definitive standard for (nor does it even care) if a file is
>> text or binary.
>
> The horse may be dead, but wasn't the original intention of MIME -
> or at least one significant - to just and simply differentiate between
> plain text and binary stuff, with the former to be sent plain, while
> the latter had to be encoded for transfer?

No... "text/" does not mean that the data is textual, but rather that,
if the recipient doesn't have a specific behaviour defined for the full
MIME type, a sensible fallback behaviour is to show the data to the end
user.

For example,

     http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4329.txt

makes it clear that

     application/javascript

is the preferred type for a .js file (and that text/javascript is
obsolete). So in a subversion repository containing javascript source
code, where care had been taken to tag that code with its proper MIME
type, diffing & merging would be disabled from working on it!

-- 
Cheers,
John
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