On Wednesday, Apr 12, 2000, Tom Ritchford writes: >>I second the motion for using MIME-ish headers, and vote vehemently >>against XML for them, on the grounds that 1) they're way overkill and 2) >>no one else uses them _as headers_ anyway, AFAIK (tho I havent kept up >>with the latest http spec). > >MIME is a description of the file's type, not of its meaning. >You might as well stick with a .suffix and be done with it!
Uh, no. Suffixes are a much smaller namespace than MIME types. >Consider: the same file could be thought of in many ways: [..] >MIME can't represent this in such detail. > >Yet this detailed level corresponds to two perfectly reasonable queries that >people might want to make from the system: > > "I need a version of this program for my 68K Mac" > "I need a low-bandwidth version of a Verge song in stereo" > > >I think of the metadata as "something to match in searches". >You can't be hidden inside the DATA portion! So where do you put them in such a way that they're standardly searchable? Isn't it possible to have simple (optional) :-delimited headers for that as well? I really, really, really think the complexity of having to build an XML parser into the clients far, far outweighs the minor gains. A suggestion, though: if we *do* want XML-described-ness, maybe an optional header like XML-Description: <key> could be used to hold a pointer to that description. --pj _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
