Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 17-Sep-91 Re: POINT OF ORDER - multip..
"Alain FONTAINE @sri.ucl (435)
This question of types/subtypes is maddening me. So, being completely mad
by now (of course I started with a strong offset in the first place), I make
the following mad proposal : Content-type should contain a single integer.
The assigned numbers RFC should list a table of the real meanings. After
all, when I see 'image/FRDT', what good does it do to me if I have an
image display, but no 'FDRT' decoder ???? /AF
While I sympathize whith your state of mind, I can't quite agree. For
starters, there are an increasing number of "do it all" tools in several
domains. In my implmentation of RFC-XXXX, for example, I route any
"image" type, regardless of subtype, to the "xview" program. Xview is
an amazing tool which can handle dozens of different image formats, and
will likely evolve to pick up new image formats at least as fast as my
mailer could do so. Similar strategies will eventually be plausible, I
predict, for audio and video, at least. And of course there is indeed a
reasonable default strategy for unrecognized subtypes of text and
text-plus, but no reasonable strategy for unrecognized numeric codes...