Dear all,
I the context of some research I am conducting at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, I encountered the following ambiguity regarding the meaning of
'media type'.
Assume I have a parameter called Y. Y is defined as follows:
"Y = a MIME media type value indicating the type of a resource". According
to both RFC 2045 and 2046, the exact meaning of Y could be defined as one of
both:
- According to RFC 2045, a media type is:
"The purpose of the Content-Type field is to describe the data contained in
the body fully enough that the receiving user agent can pick an appropriate
agent or mechanism to present the data to the user, or otherwise deal with
the data in an appropriate manner. The value in this field is called a media
type."
As such, a possible value of Y could be "text/xml; charset=utf-8"?
- Based on some illustrative examples in RFC 2046, I could also derive that
a media type is a general category of data content, such as: 'application',
an 'image', a 'text' message, a 'video' stream, and so forth. Each of these
media types can have 'subtypes'. For example, the 'text' media type has four
subtypes: 'plain', 'richtext', 'enriched', and 'tab-separated' values.
As such, a possible value of Y could be: "text"
Am I correct in stating this? Could someone clarify this ambiguity? How
should I change the definition of Y in order to exclude one of both
meanings?
Thanks in advance
Kind regards
Jeroen Bekaert
--
Digital Library Research and Prototyping team
Los Alamos National Laboratory
PO Box 1663, MS P362
Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA
tel. +1 (505) 664 0580
Department of Electronics and Information Systems
Faculty of Engineering, Ghent University
Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41
B-9000 Ghent, Belgium