Dear all,
I the context of some research I am conducting at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, I encountered the following ambiguity regarding the meaning of 'media type'. Assume I have a parameter called Y. Y is defined as follows: "Y = a MIME media type value indicating the type of a resource". According to both RFC 2045 and 2046, the exact meaning of Y could be defined as one of both: - According to RFC 2045, a media type is: "The purpose of the Content-Type field is to describe the data contained in the body fully enough that the receiving user agent can pick an appropriate agent or mechanism to present the data to the user, or otherwise deal with the data in an appropriate manner. The value in this field is called a media type." As such, a possible value of Y could be "text/xml; charset=utf-8"? - Based on some illustrative examples in RFC 2046, I could also derive that a media type is a general category of data content, such as: 'application', an 'image', a 'text' message, a 'video' stream, and so forth. Each of these media types can have 'subtypes'. For example, the 'text' media type has four subtypes: 'plain', 'richtext', 'enriched', and 'tab-separated' values. As such, a possible value of Y could be: "text" Am I correct in stating this? Could someone clarify this ambiguity? How should I change the definition of Y in order to exclude one of both meanings? Thanks in advance Kind regards Jeroen Bekaert -- Digital Library Research and Prototyping team Los Alamos National Laboratory PO Box 1663, MS P362 Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA tel. +1 (505) 664 0580 Department of Electronics and Information Systems Faculty of Engineering, Ghent University Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41 B-9000 Ghent, Belgium