At 07:22 PM 1/17/02 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> > > At what point does it make sense to move beyond MIME?
> > >
> >
> > Is it MIME or just the singular Content-Type that is a problem?
>
>Singular content-type. I don't think the rest of MIME (except some
>encoding issues) causes much trouble.
MIME content-types are intended to be acted on. Their descriptive capabilities
are secondary, and are extended and supplemented by other content fields,
including content-disposition and content-features.
Well, we now have ways to express other (non-primary) content types.
E.g., per RFC 2912, RFC 2913, ...
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="break"
Content-features:
(& (Type="text/plain") (Type="image/jpeg") (Type="audio/wav") )
Exactly. This is the solution I suggest the last time this topic came up on
this list. Features are extensible to include new "axes" of description,
including things that come from XML.
People seem to think MIME is the same now as it was in 1993. Not so. We've
added a lot, including but not limited to facilities for describing content
that consists of multiple formats.
Ned