- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 16:37:04 -0700
- To: "'Dan Brickley'" <danbri@danbri.org>
- Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
Thanks for your comments & research. I'm more amused by the history than I should be, so I included the quotes you found!! Thanks so much! I added a more general note about servers being delivered with a text/plain default. Larry -----Original Message----- From: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@danbri.org] Sent: Sunday, May 30, 2010 1:30 AM To: Larry Masinter Cc: www-tag@w3.org Subject: Re: MIME and the Web On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 5:56 AM, Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org> wrote: > This is a draft (for TAG ACTION-425) for discussion at an upcoming W3C TAG > meeting. In its current form, I think it may be more suitable as a ‘note’, > but I’d like to get TAG (and community, including W3C and IETF) agreement on > its contents, before going on to update various Findings, BCPs and > specifications. Nice writeup. One tiny editorial comment, and also in case useful, some historical links from www-talk archives. BTW the w3.org search there is broken for pre-1995 posts; the content doesn't seem to be indexed. I found an interesting collection of architectural discussions from 1992, nothing earlier (but I only skimmed the archive). Editorial: "HTTP 0.9 assumed that what was transferred could be" - could be what? could be transferred? rendered/displayed? I also had a quick look into the old HTTP-NG docs as I remembered there was some detailed critique of MIME in there somewhere, but didn't find anything useful to cite. Perhaps also worth citing Apache's mime.types file http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/branches/1.3.x/conf/mime.t ypes as one major de-facto database of file type to file name mappings? Some archive excerpts follow. The fact that both those archives and www-tag are all public is worth celebrating, I think. (But whether these links are worth including in your document, I have no opinion...). cheers, Dan http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/ http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1992MayJun/0038.html MIME, SGML, UDIs, HTML and W3 Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@zippy.lcs.mit.edu) Thu, 11 Jun 92 12:22:56 -0400 "1. MIME classification of data formats First of all, the MIME job of classifying data formats is a useful job which is ideally done by just one bunch of people. Ther has been some suggestion that the MIME classifications are not well enough defined, but they seem to be the best effort yet and one can only assume they will eveolve in the right direction. So I'd back the use of these for W3." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1992MayJun/0020.html MIME as a hypertext architecture Dan Connolly (connolly@pixel.convex.com) Sat, 06 Jun 92 00:53:20 CDT "The WWW project needs an architecture for interchange of structured multimedia hypertext documents. The original architecture, HTML, introduced some structuring conventions and a way of specifying hypertext links. The HTML format is under stress from several issues: * We need an SGML DTD so that we can parse HTML using something besides the public implementation of WWW, and so that we can verify documents converted from other authoring systems such as GNU info, Andew's EZ, or FrameMaker. * We need to be able to distribute documents and document elements in other formats, including raw 8 bit data streams. The SGML NOTATION feature falls short of providing and adequate mechanism. * The UDI syntax doesn't match the SGML attribute syntax. There are problems with quoting out-of-band characters, and the length of complex UDI's may exceed SGML limits and/or line-length limits of transport mechanisms. Also, the terse syntax of UDI's conflicts with the goal that they be human-readable. This is a proposed architecture for global hypertext, addressing the issues raised by the WWW project, but using the MIME architecture." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1992SepOct/0024.html misconceptions about MIME [long] Dan Connolly (connolly@pixel.convex.com) Wed, 21 Oct 92 20:09:36 CDT ..."FROM GLOBAL HYPERTEXT TO GLOBAL HYPERMEDIA The Internet currently serves as the backbone for a global hypertext. FTP and email provided a good start, and the gopher, WWW, or WAIS clients and servers make wide area information browsing simple. These systems even interoperate, with email servers talking to FTP servers, WWW clients talking to gopher servers, on and on. This currently works quite well for text. But what should WWW clients do as Gopher and WAIS servers begin to serve up pictures, sounds, movies, spreadsheet templates, postscript files, etc.? It would be a shame for each to adopt its own multimedia typing system. If they all adopt the MIME typing system (and as many other features from MIME as are appropriate), we can step from global hypertext to global hypermedia that much easier." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1992SepOct/0035.html Re: misconceptions about MIME [long] Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com) Tue, 27 Oct 1992 14:38:18 PST ""If I wish to retrieve the document, say to view it, I might want to choose the available representation that is most appropriate for my purpose. Imagine my dismay to retrieve a 50 megabyte postscript file from an anonymous FTP archive, only to discover that it is in the newly announced Postscript level 4 format, or to try to edit it only to discover that it is in the (upwardly compatible but not parsable by my client) version 44 of Rich Text. In each case, the appropriateness of alternate sources and representations of a document would depend on information that is currently only available in-band. I believe that MIME was developed in the context of electronic mail, but that the usage patterns in space and time of archives, database services and the like require more careful attention (a) to out-of-band information about format versions, so that you might know, before you retrieve a representation, whether you have the capability of coping with it, and (b) some restriction on those formats which might otherwise be uncontrollable. "" http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1992SepOct/0056.html Re: misconceptions about MIME [long] Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com) Fri, 30 Oct 1992 15:54:56 PST "I propose (once again) that instead of saying 'application/postscript' it say, at a minimum, 'application/postscript 1985' vs 'application/postscript 1994' or whatever you would like to designate as a way to uniquely identify which edition of the Postscript reference manual you are talking about; instead of being identified as 'image/tiff' the files be identified as 'image/tiff 5.0 Class F' vs 'image/tiff 7.0 class QXB'."
Received on Saturday, 5 June 2010 23:37:43 UTC