As long as we have untyped protocols like FTP,
magic numbers will remain useful. ...
Good point.
I'm somewhat depressed by what a half-assed job some systems do
when mapping from MIME types to OS-specific types.
Mee too. Futhermore, I really believe there are TWO
levels of "typing" that should be done, one at the encoding and/or
transport level (and in MIME, this is exclusively an encoding
operation and transport should be left alone) the other at the
application level. The former is decidedly a "canonicalization"
thing. The latter should be more closely tied to Content-Type
than it is in practice.
In other words, we're using CT for more than we should.
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.
Certainly.
- Chris
--
Rick Troth at La Casita, Houston, Texas, USA