--On Friday, May 04, 2012 19:26 -0700 Ned Freed
<ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com> wrote:
You're right, it would be nice if there were some way to
distinguish containers from content in MIME types. But given
the existing historical mess, and that some kinds of
compression are just a different way to encode a bunch of
bits (zlib) whereas others are more like a small filesystem
(zip and tgz), even if we could start with a clean sheet it's
not obvious to me what would be the best thing to do.
This is further complicated by the fact that there are now a
number of types defined that are actually zip with specific
semantics attached to the content. There are also types
defined for use only within such containers.
With the wonderful advantage of hindsight, it might have been
better to define compound Content-Types/Media Types or a
universal encoding parameter rather than trying to separate
C-T-E out. The first might have given us, e.g.,
application/foo+base64 and 'application/bar+xml+gzip' or
'application/bar+xml+gzip+base64'; the second something like
application/foo; encoding="base64" and 'application/bar+xml;
encoding=gzip+base64'. Obviously a little late now :-(
And, again, not a blocking issue for this document, one way or
the other.
john