[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Re: MIME Type for SVG images in SVN config

From: Ryan Schmidt <subversion-2008b_at_ryandesign.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:31:13 -0500

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

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe_at_subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help_at_subversion.tigris.org
Received on 2008-06-24 08:31:39 CEST

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Users mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.