Re: [XHR] Use of the term 'MIME type'

On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 03:56:31 +0100, Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.org>  
wrote:
> In reading through the current draft of XMLHttpRequest [1] I see a
> consistent use of the term 'MIME type' instead of 'Media Type'  as
> defined by RFC 2046 [2].  RFC 2046 does not define the term 'MIME
> type' and only refers to 'MIME Media Type' once within the RFC
> document.  Otherwise, it would seem the proper term is 'Media Type'.
>
> Further, the 'Content-Type' header used to type the MIME entity as  
> described as:
>
> "The Content-Type field is used to specify the nature of the data in
> the body of a MIME entity, by giving media type and subtype
> identifiers, and by providing auxiliary information that may be
> required for certain media types."
>
> Again, it would seem the value is a 'Media Type' and not a 'MIME
> type'.  I think it would be preferred for this specification and RFC
> 2046 agreed on the data type name for the value of the Content-Type
> header.

As the terminology section states I am using MIME type per HTML5. The  
reasons why that specification uses that term are described here:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/infrastructure.html#mime-type

If you disagree with those reasons you can file a bug against HTML5 and  
get the HTML WG to look at it. To make it not too much of a Kafkaesque  
process I am willing to provide assistance if you wish to do that and need  
help.


> [1] http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/XMLHttpRequest/
> [2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2046


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Wednesday, 26 January 2011 14:14:56 UTC