On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 09:08, Matthew King<matthew.k...@monnsta.net> wrote: > Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> writes: > >> Everyone is >> moving AWAY from using metadata for anything that will break >> functionality if it's lost. > > Metadata like the HTTP Content-Type header?
Yes, like that. You'll note that many web pages -- especially static ones -- still end in .htm or .html despite the Content-Type header. Not least, I imagine, because that gets lost once you save the content to disk, and then all that's left to identify the content type is the extension. Similarly with e-mail attachments; they might send a MIME Content-Type identifying the attachment, but as soon as you save the attachment to disk, poof! Gone. (At least with the filesystems I'm familiar with.) Hence, filename extensions on e-mail attachments. (Also: it's not for nothing that MSIE does content sniffing for certain MIME types [IIRC, including text/plain and application/octet-stream], simply because there are/were web servers that sent the wrong content type so that MS decided the content type couldn't be trusted in all cases.) Cheers, Philip -- Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
