At 5:34 PM 9/1/93 -0500, Rick Troth wrote:
Say Chris wants to send a .ZIP between two PCs.
But this doesn't seem to me to require a new MIME type anywhere,
especially since we're talking about something that is (today, anyway)
very platform specific.
1. Note well your parenthetical. More and more things are
binary-interoperable. The example you're using is in fact so; I have an
"Unzip" application on my Mac.
2. Is there a one-to-one mapping of three-character extension to data
types? I was under the impression there was not, even if you consider only
PC's. Now, MUA's must rely on other signals to differentiate data types.
These other signals really need to be used uniformly and now you need a
registry again.
Let me state this a little more strongly: if someone tries to
grow MIME to cover too many bases, it will either become unused or
hated for its monstrous size. Keep it simple and people will love it.
Merely growing the list of subtypes doesn't make MIME any more complex. It
just makes the possible information it can carry bigger.
I guess if you're doing file transfer between two known-to-be-identical
environments, you may as well just slap on application/octet-stream and a
filename and be done with it.
But if there's any chance you're going to send this file anyplace that is
any different from where it came from (and I would argue that this is going
to be reasonable more and more of the time), I think using a registered
MIME subtype is a very smart thing to do.
--
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Inc.