Tom Ritchford <tom at swirly.com> wrote: > >There are different types of metadata, though (exhaustively categorized on > >this list previously). For some purposes, it Just Doesn't Matter. In my > >Freenet web browser, for example, I don't give a damn who wrote the song, I > >just want to know its format so I can play it! And I don't want to parse a > >mountain of XML to find out. A header of Content-type: audio/x-wav suits > >me just fine. > > It's going to be a VERY rare person indeed who just wants to play an mp3 > and doesn't care where it's Beethoven or the Butthole Surfers.
Um, it's an extremely common person. It's a person who's just been handed an unlabelled binary file from some source and wants to know what format it's in so his browser can do something sensible with it. You are confusing playing with liking. > >But please don't cram it in the headers when we have a perfectly good > >standard system of identifying types which everyone already supports. > > As I also pointed out in my previous message, MIME-types do a perfectly > good job of describing the TYPE of the file. > > It's really hard to come up with any occasion where that's much use! > It's very rare in my life that I'm looking for for an HTML file, any > HTML file. And when you view that HTML file, do you refuse to load any inline images until you have determined their photographer, resolution, and country of origin to make sure they are acceptable, on the principle that you don't want to just look at an image, any image? Hm, I suspect instead that your browser just notices it's an image/gif or image/jpeg and shows it to you. > >If you want searchability, add your XML description alongside the file. > > Which, as I pointed out, completely prevents searchability. > Unless you really want to open and parse every file in the > system when you search. Put them in node indexes. Submit them to search engines. Do whatever you like with them, just don't stuff them in message headers. I'm not saying abolish XML. I'm not saying you must only search by mime-types. I'm saying that when you send me a file, you can send me all the XML cruft you like along with it, but at least stick a simple tag on so my browser knows how to display it. theo _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
