Re: MIME type for RELAX NG

On Monday 13 December 2004 15:15, John Cowan wrote:
> Robin Berjon scripsit:
> > Allow me to turn this around: I would question why we not need a MIME
> > type for both RNG syntaxes. You may have no use for it, and I may have
> > limited (but existing) use for it, but you never know what users might
> > do with it. Media type registrations are cheap, better to have one not
> > used than to need one not done.
>
> If there's a media-type and an associated .rnc extension, then Apache
> config files will tend to associate .rnc with application/relax-ng-compact
> or whatever it is.  Browsers will then pick up that media type, assume
> they can't read the file, and punt to saving it.   This is annoying.

I think the "Right" answer to that is that the user agent should be properly 
configured to handle that mimetype in a suitable/preferrable way. In 
practice, it's another matter, though.

I can tell why I want a MIME type: desktop environments uses the MIME type for 
identifying files, and displaying proper meta data about them, such as 
comments, "Microsoft Word Document", and icons(I'm scouting for adding the 
mime type to KDE, btw). In a (currently private) project of mine, a 
regression framework, has tests which declares what type of files they should 
apply to by using the MIME type as identifier. In other words, I don't 
emphasize the encoding issue which is the central point in the MIME system's 
original intent(mail etc), but rather its way of communicating file type.


Cheers,

                Frans