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Re: Character set registration

1995-12-18 20:25:53
It may be that the distinction between text/* and application/* is
artificial, and that we should move toward automatically
cross-registering media types (or at least register anything that is
seen as text/foo to also be application/foo) in order to get around
this dilemma.

One distinction between text/* and application/* which is highly
important in choosing which one to use, is that an unknown subtype
of text/* can be displayed as if it were text/plain.

This goes out the window if we allow place certain constraints on
text/*.  It also goes out the window if we start cross-registering
all text/* types.

Let people register application/html if they want to, and use it
only when it is needed to display a wierd character set; that way
browsers that support wierd character sets can accept application/html
in addition to text/html, while other browsers that only deal with
html if it uses the same special character as ASCII, can say that
they only accept text/html.

I'd still prefer for there to be a new top-level type for text w/o the
restrictions on text/*, but modulo that this makes perfectly good sense to
me.

                                Ned