I shouldn't have to download an entire
text/xml or application/xml document only to find out that the contents are
in a form that my application isn't interested in.
Before we invest a lot of effort into solving this problem, could you
please give a couple of _realistic_ examples where
a) this is really a problem and
b) MIME type labelling would actually help?
It sounds nice in principal, but for the most part, the examples given
are very weak. For the most part, the examples I've seen are based on
some hypothetical world in which there are thousands of different documents
and document types in different repositories, and people are browsing
indiscriminately among the ones that fit their application.
I've not yet seen a real example. The closest I've seen is the calendaring
example, where someone gets lots of calendar messages along with other
messages in their email box, and the application is trying to sort out
which things are calendar requests from just ordinary email by filtering
on the MIME type. But I'm suspicious of this application; for a long
list of reasons, it seems like the wrong use of the MIME type to determine
the intent of the message.
Larry