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Re: Criminals

2003-08-30 10:02:09
On Sat, 30 Aug 2003 15:26:38 +0859, Masataka Ohta said:
MIME is too much e-mail centric.

For an E-mail centric protocol, it's worked pretty well on port 80....

On most OSes, including but not limited to UNIX, that's the way to
designate content types of files.

But it's not *universally* true, so you have to come up with some sideband
way of conveying information.  And in fact, even if two systems both
support extensions as a *mandatory* flagging, you can still run into
trouble - what if the two systems don't use the *same* extension for
a filetype that should be portable?  Should a postscript file end in .PS,
.ps, .PST?  Should a VisualBasic script be .VB or .VBS?  Is a image/jpeg
file a .JPG or .JPEG?

And if extensions are non-mandatory, it's just a mess.  Think about the
security implications of "Here's an executable called foo.JPG" (Microsoft
didn't - that's the basic cause of MS03-032).

Instead, MIME developers arrogantly claimed that OSes should be
modified to support MIME content-type (and even that text files
on OSes should use MIME format to support other tags such as
charset).

No.

This claim is right up there with "SMTP developers arrogantly claimed
that OSs should be modified to support network-standard EOL".

And of course they didn't.  They merely insisted that the user agent at
either end convert to/from the local format.

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