- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2010 11:09:06 -0700
- To: "'Dan Brickley'" <danbri@danbri.org>, "'Sebastien Lambla'" <seb@serialseb.com>
- Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
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