On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
This seems to be the way things are heading. I personally would like to
see MIME content-type headers used by file-systems, a system superior for
various reasons to the 'magic number', filename-extension and MacOS
4-byte code systems.
As long as we have untyped protocols like FTP, magic numbers will remain
useful. For a good discussion on the design and use of magic numbers, see
RFC 2083.
I'm somewhat depressed by what a half-assed job some systems do when
mapping from MIME types to OS-specific types. If I send a word document
with a filename "foo.xls" and label it application/msword, then anything
which doesn't treat it as a word document at the other end is inherently
broken.
- Chris