RE: What does a document mean?

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Elliotte Rusty Harold [SMTP:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
> Sent:	Friday, April 05, 2002 6:05 AM
> To:	www-tag@w3.org
> Subject:	Re: What does a document mean?
> 
> At 8:45 PM -0800 3/31/02, Tim Bray wrote:
> 
> >>I don't know that I believe that all documents on the Web have MIME
> types.
> >
> >Yes they do.  If only application/octet-stream.  If they don't
> >they're not on the web.
> 
> Can you cite the specs that prove that? Maybe it depends on what you 
> mean by "on the web". I can believe this is true for http/https, but 
> I'm not nearly as convinced for all other protocols out there. FTP 
> predates MIME. Do you define "on the web" as "served by http"?
> 
I can't cite specs that prove it, but I can cite practical experience.

Using the LWP (libwww-perl) I just tried the following:

% cat lwp-head.pl
use LWP::Simple ;
#pun intended :=)
($content_type, @rest) = head ($ARGV[0]) ;
print "$content_type\n" ;

% perl lwp-head.pl ftp://anonymous:paul.v.biron%64kp.org@rtfm.mit.edu/
text/ftp-dir-listing

% perl lwp-head.pl
ftp://anonymous:paul.v.biron%64kp.org@rtfm.mit.edu/Index-byname
application/octet-stream

% perl lwp-head.pl
ftp://anonymous:paul.v.biron%64kp.org@rtfm.mit.edu/pub/net/internet.text
text/plain

I also tried several other ftp servers and all returned MIME content-type
headers for all successful requests.  Whether they *should* is again,
something that I don't know...

pvb

Received on Friday, 5 April 2002 19:19:28 UTC