Paul Sander wrote :
|| >--- Forwarded mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
||
|| >Very yes. Though unix has extensionless files, the web and MIME are defacto
|| >using suffixes for file type id.
||
|| Well, they do and they don't. MIME provides a way of supplying the type of
|| some content along with the data itself. That mechanism in itself does not
|| rely on file extensions. However, certain software (such as email clients
|| and web servers) use lookup tables to map file extensions to MIME types on
|| those occasions where they must somehow conjure up a type without asking a
|| user for it. But once a file is encoded with MIME, its original extension
|| becomes meaningless because its type is carried along explicitly.
I think that "mime type" is mostly a side-issue. It gives a nice set
of names that an admin might want to use, but doesn't help much
more. New files will have to be classified and the classificatio
that has been determined will have to be stored in a control file
(not embedded in a wrapper around the actual data the way mime is put
on mail). The classification would be by the user providing an
explicit type or by an add hook examining the file (both the data
content and the filename/extension to the extent that the platform
provides those) and trying to classify it automatically. The
classification hook should have a way of giving up, so that the
fallback position of asking the user is used.
--
Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not | John Macdonald
taking life seriously enough -- Larry Wall | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
