ietf-822
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Re: Last Call: A Chemical Primary Content Type for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions to Proposed Standard

1995-05-23 11:08:25
[I think there's enough bickering going on about standardising mime-types 
 to make it worth a Last Call. If the IESG had gone ahead without one, 
 and decided to either accept or reject on their one  there would have 
 been enough people annoyed be the decision to start another round of 
 mass executions, and it's a lot harder to get bullets in Stockholm]

Personally, I don't have any problems with having a plethora of top-level 
types for cases such as this. Apart from the meta-types 'multipart' and 
'application', I always thought that the first part of the type name was 
meant to distinguish between major 'media' types - text, image, audio, 
etc- in general, it's pretty easy to negotiate and convert between 
subtypes of a top level type, but much harder to convert at the higher 
level. 

This distinction is useful, and necessarily implies a top level type for 
each major semantic group capable of multiple concrete representations. 
Forcing all possible structured types under a single top level simply to 
try and impose a pattern of order over an essentially chaotic world is 
the Geneva way.

LET A THOUSAND MIME TYPES BLOOM!

Simon 
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April 19th == 4/19.  4+19 = 23. Any Questions?