Larry Masinter wrote:
"Provide the minimum information necessary for a recipient to be able
to decide on an appropriate processor for an incoming message"
Why does this bar the door to an XML top-level type? What is so scary
about this that you aren't interested in doing the job as well as possible
rather than just saying "we've provided you with the least possible amount
of information so that you still have to guess what this pile of junk is"?
Different applications will need different categorizations of information,
and attempts to put too many application-specific parameters into the
MIME type will result in granularities of descriptions that may support
some applications and interfere with others.
If you're going to describe something, describing it halfway seems like a
waste of time.
"... In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the
Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the
Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps
were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of
the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it
point for point."
---- From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J.A. Suarez Miranda in Jorge
Luis Borges' 'Of Exactitude in Science' A Universal History of Infamy (1972)