At 10:22 AM 5/9/99 -0700, Ned Freed wrote:
There is also an intermediate case -- IMAP. In IMAP header information for
a MIME message can be downloaded and examined prior to downloading the
actual message content. But this is restricted to the labelling in header
fields -- media type, media type parameters, and disposition information,
in other words.
If we ever get the rescap protocol finished, however, this won't be an
issue, because the sender could have determined that the recipient couldn't
(or didn't want) the type of information they were sending by looking at
the media features of the receiver.
The long and short of it is that I don't see either extreme position on this
issue as tenable. The notion of "all XML goes under the application/xml media
type and a different mechanism is used to distinguish different instances of
XML usage" is a nonstarter, and so is "every little twiddle to something done
in XML gets a new media type". I also don't think that XML is even close to
mature enough for us to attempt to establish definitive rules for when a media
type is needed and when it isn't.
I'll certainly agree with the last parts. The XML community isn't close to
agreeing on whether it's FPIs or namespaces or the-next-big-thing that
should be used as the identifier for what program should be used to process
a particular XML object.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium