"Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" wrote:
I consider the original question to have been pretty insulting.
OK, I accept that you consider it so; it wasn't intended to be, and Paul
Hoffman seemed to treat it like a simple request for information and
responded with that information.
There
is only one set of MIME types for all uses.
That is also my understanding; I was checking that this is shared and
agreed upon context for this discussion. I have heard other opinions
voice the contrary.
The name of the list is
ietf-xml-mime, not email-xml-mime.
Right, so we are clear it is about MIME; and if we read the MIME RFCs we
are clear that that MIME is about email, and not necessarily clear that
it is about any other protocol.
So it seemed better to ask at first than to risk misunderstandings
because of a lack of shared assumptions.
If it had been hosted at the W3C,
would non-web uses have been ignored?
Yes, unless they could be shown to follow naturally and pretty much for
free from the Web uses.
The Web is the universe of network-accessible information. So, that
includes mail, ftp, and so on.
It struck me as an entirely reasonable question, in particular since the
RFC that defines text/xml and application/xml refers to "MIME-like
protocols" which seems to imply that HTTP is not MIME (something I have
heard asserted in the past).
So, if everyone agrees that the scope is, at minimum, both email and
HTTP, then we can move on. It never hurts, I find, to state exactly what
problem is being solved before attempting to solve it.
--
Chris