> > Agree 100%. However, MIME is not a complete descriptor of file > type unfortunately. > > I can't tell if an executable will run on my machine, a > streaming audio clip will fit my bandwidth, or such since > this information isn't MIME encoded. >
True. Certainly there are things you'll want/need to know about data that isn't expressed in MIME type. It all depends on how much information you want to glob into a single piece of information called "type". The word "type" itself is very generic. The statement "the type of this song is a Beatles song" is perfectly valid from a logical standpoint, but it doesn't conform with the use of the word "type" w.r.t. MIME, or filename extensions, or magic, or whatever; all those things are primarily useful in figuring out *what application to open a file with*. Not that I want to be stuck with a one-to-one mapping from MIME type to application. In fact, I'm working on an XML app right now for rules-based handling of incoming files in a client, so I can, say, feed "audio/mpeg" with a key of "*electronic*" to WinAmp, and all other "audio/mpeg" to Sonique. (Silly example I know.) I think this the way this delegation to external apps is done in the current browsers and window-managers-pretending-to-be-browsers-and-operating-systems is pitiful, inflexible, and hard to use (nearly impossible in the case of Windows file type associations). > I *never* argued against using MIME-types! > They are merely incomplete. > I argued *for* including a markup language component Sorry, I guess I misunderstood your point. > >I still think putting XML right IN the header, encoding it to remove > >linefeeds, is going to be extremely icky. > > I don't see that the headers will be so very long: Well it's easy to come up with simple cases that have one or two pieces of information and look pretty. It's harder to try to express all the meaningful metadata about, say, an MP3, and have it still look pretty. Not that prettiness of headers is important at all. WebDAV dumps XML in HTTP headers I think, so there is some precedent for it. > > I AM sorry for coming off as pugnacious... I don't have any specific > technical ax to grind, > More power to you. Obviously I'm not too concerned about it myself. :) I think sometimes people put in so many IMHOs and AFAIKs and "sorry if this has been covered before"s and so on, that I can't find their signal in the middle of all that apologist noise. _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
