On Jun 23, 2008, at 07:50, John Aldridge wrote:
> Jan Hendrik wrote:
>
>> 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!
"Preferred" seems to be in the eye of the beholder to me. For
example, if the user is wanting to view a web site, then they do not
want to see JavaScript (or CSS or HTML) source code and an
application/ prefix would fit. However, if the user is a web site
developer, then they very well might want to see JavaScript (or CSS
or HTML) source code and a text/ prefix would seem more appropriate.
I don't like the situation. We've just had a similar discussion on
the Graphviz development list about choosing a MIME type (and a new
filename extension) for Graphviz graph description files. Should it
be text/... or application/...? We were looking at RFC 2046, and as
far as I can tell it depends on whether the user is someone who wants
to see the graph source code or the rendered graph.
https://mailman.research.att.com/pipermail/graphviz-devel/
2008/000735.html
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Received on 2008-06-24 08:31:39 CEST