RE: The use of MIME on the web: issues, toward a revised "finding" or joint W3C/IETF document

The main problem I've seen is when people are not careful to 
distinguish the "internet media type" from the "content-type
string", because the latter can contain parameters

text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1  vs. text/plain;charset=windows-1252,
for example, which share a "Internet Media Type" but are
different content-type strings.

So

draft-abarth-mime-sniff talks about MIME type sniffing, but the
charset sniffing is in a different document. I think the general
topic of "sniffing" (i.e., examining content using heuristics
to determine the likely actual type, whether or not there is
a content-type label supplied) might be approached more holistically
if the terminology were clearer.

I'm not sure if there are other terminology confusions
that are as serious.

MIME was the protocol design which defined Internet Media Type
registry, subsequently adopted by HTTP (between HTTP 0.9
and HTTP 1.0), so it's understandable how "MIME type" and
"Internet Media Type" are sometimes used interchangeably.


Larry



-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@danbri.org] 
Sent: Sunday, April 04, 2010 9:15 AM
To: Sebastien Lambla
Cc: Larry Masinter; www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: The use of MIME on the web: issues, toward a revised
"finding" or joint W3C/IETF document

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Sebastien Lambla <seb@serialseb.com>
wrote:
> As both a web framework author and trainer, I find that there is
lots of confusion introduced when various names are introduced for
various areas, such as the Internet Media Type being referred to as
MIME, as in "MIME sniffing" or "The use of MIME", as opposed to the
historical MIME type.
>
> For me, tomatoes and tomatoes, but for the people that I introduce
to those standards, I feel that those things are a barrier to wider
communication.

Yes, this is a good point. I've been involved in standards plenty but
have only a pretty vague instinct for how I'm supposed to refer to
this stuff. Generally I tend to *say* "MIME-type", but have this loose
guilty sense that the real label is "Media type", but that as a phrase
seems somehow less specific whereas "MIME-type" has the feel of a
precise technical term. In either case I mean "those things like
'text/html' and 'application/rdf+xml'". It would be great to have a
terminology summary / bluffer's guide.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Sunday, 4 April 2010 18:09:43 UTC