Re: [rox-users] mime database

[Matthew W. O. <wei...@gr...>]

-- Thomas Leonard <ta...@ec...> wrote
(on Monday, 10 February 2003, 11:54 AM +0000):
> On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 10:25:50AM +0100, Laurent Moussault wrote:
> > Albert Wagner:
> 
> > > (3) Source files for languages such as c, c++, Haskell and java are
> > > defined as text/x-<lang>, while languages such as perl and python
> > > are defined as application/x-<lang>.  Why?
> > 
> > Because perl and python files are associated with a standard
> > application, while C and C++ files could be processed by many
> > different tools.
> 
> Yes, although it's actually pretty random. The 'text' group is really
> stupid, because anything that it makes sense to load into a text editor
> goes there. Eg, a Word document isn't considered text, but HTML is.

To my understanding, that's the reason the text group exists -- to
categorize *any* plain-text document. To that end, the above *does* make
sense -- you *can't* open a Word document in a text editor as it's in a
binary format, but you *can* open an html document in one as it is plain
text. 

And the beauty of MIME (not to preach to somebody who helps write
standards!) is that once you know the type, you can assign it a handler,
so any *specific* type can be loaded in a specific app. Which means that
you can define the default *handler* for text/html to open it in a
browser instead of a text editor. 

Where it gets fuzzy for me is separating *some* plain-text files into
the 'application' group simply because they are associated with a
particular application. For instance, PHP files are given MIME type
'application/x-php' -- yet you cannot load this file in a PHP engine
simply by clicking on it from your desktop; it has to be run through a
web server with the appropriate PHP module. RTF files can be loaded
directly into a text editor as well as a variety of word processors;
does 'application/rtf' make more sense than 'text/rtf'?

Of course, I'm sure there's been a lot of discussion of this stuff in
the past... But the point I'm making is that saying that any one MIME
group is any more stupid than another seems a bit silly, as the argument
could be made for any of them.

-- 
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
wei...@gr...