We're working on a MIME implementation with extenstions to handle the
transport of PC files.
If what you're concerned with is specifically file transfer,
I'd suggest having a look at RFC 1440.
Obviously the generic APPLICATION/ type will
transport them, but we want our user agent to be able to determine
what "application" generated the file, and further to do something
"intelligent" with it, including extracting the file into an appropriate
filename (with extension) onto the PC and potentially launching the
related application.
The RFC 1440 client I've written uses MIME if it can't connect
via TCP directly. In this case, I chose application/octet-stream
and appended things like name=filename.ext as parameters. This has
worked remarkably well, if you have a reasonably well behaved MIME MUA
on the receiving end.
We have to use the PC extension as a guideline for identifying the
application ...
If you stick with PC-to-PC scenarios, then keying off the
.EXT should work quite nicely. NeXT had a lot of success with their
browser using .extensions even in the Unix (Mach, actually) world.
I'd rather see this than a plethora of MIME types.
TIA,
Chris Bartram
--
Rick Troth <troth(_at_)rice(_dot_)edu>, Rice University, Information Systems