At 2:22 PM -0800 10/30/98, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
My understanding of top-level types is that image, audio & video indicate
what the stream encodes, whereas text (and perhaps message) indicate how
the stream is encoded. For instance, 'text/vnd.abc' encodes audio, but is
encoded in text.
This is a very common MISunderstanding.
Any MIME content type can have textual semantics, simply by specifying
textual semantics in the document that defines the type. Doesn't matter if
it's application/whatever, image/whatever, etc. You can specify that it be
slung around as a textual thing, with newline canonicalization, charset,
language, whatever.
Text subtypes, on the other hand are assumed to have textual semantics, but
it doesn't end there. For a subtype to belong in text, it must have a
further property, that of being appropriate for normal users to read
without any special software.
So, your textual encoding of audio is not "text/vnd.abc", it's
"audio/vnd.abc". But it's still allowed to be textual.