"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote in message news:mailman.2298.1299479088.4748.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > On Sunday 06 March 2011 22:09:22 Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> "Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote in message >> news:mailman.2280.1299459971.4748.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... >> >> > This reminds me. I should look into mime types one of these days to see >> > what the >> > appropriate way (if any) would be to put support for them in Phobos. It >> > would be >> > nice to not have to go by extension for the few programs that I have >> > which have >> > to worry about file type. >> >> I'm no unix expert, but my understanding is that mime types in the >> filesystem don't even exist at all, and that what it *really* does is use >> some complex black-box-ish algorithm that takes into account the first >> few >> bytes of the file, the extention, the exec flag, and god-knows-what-else >> to >> determine what type of file it is. Contrary to how people keep making it >> sound, mime type is *not* the determining factor (and cannot possibly >> be), >> but rather nothing more than the way the *result* of all that analysis is >> represented. > > I thought that the first few bytes of the file _were_ the mime type. > Certainly, > from what I've seen, extension has _no_ effect on most programs. Konqueror > certainly acts like it does everything by mime type - file associations > are set > that way. >
No, MIME is a text-based filetype-naming system thst originated from SMTP and then got adopted by HTTP and various other things. It's like a really verbose file extension that isn't stored as part of the filename. These are some MIME types: application/json application/soap+xml application/xhtml+xml application/x-gzip image/jpeg text/plain text/xml video/mp4 application/x-www-form-urlencoded More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mime_type