On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 17:54, Keith Moore wrote:
It's not MIME's fault that it was designed in an era when no one
expected the possibility of creating such labelled content. However,
such content is useful, and MIME's inability to handle such things
definitely feels like a limitation from the perspective of people who
like such things.
I don't see an inability of MIME to handle labelled content, I see
XML's deliberate decision to use a means of content-labelling which
was incompatible with MIME, while still expecting to use MIME
framing to convey XML from one place to another.
How would you have proposed that XML's developers create a
MIME-compliant form of content labelling?
Or would you simply have banned the notion of mixing different
vocabularies into a single document?
MIME does have its limitations
Anything with only two levels is pretty well guaranteed to run into a
need for three or more.
MIME is a legacy technology. It works well for what it did and does.
That doesn't mean it'll work well going forward. (And the same may well
happen to XML over a similar period of time.)
On the other hand, it might be worth the trouble to define a
different transmission format for the sole purpose of shipping
XML around. It's not as if either SMTP or HTTP is ideal for
this purpose either.
No, they're not very efficient. I'm not convinced however, that sending
XML over separate pipes is particularly sensible either.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com