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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Re: DocBook filename extension


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steinar Bang" <sb@dod.no>


> >>>>> Brian Lalonde <brianiacus@yahoo.com>:
> 
> > When is a MIME type more useful than an extension?
> 
> As to "When", my answer is "always".

Not so!

Proof by existance counterexamples:
  1. text/plain  .txt .c .h .pl .pod .java .doc etc
  2. application/octect-stream  .exe .class .bin
  3. XSL: text/xml or text/xsl?
  4. text/xml files (XSL, RSS, et al may not include a !DOCTYPE)
  5. The degenerate application/* (which is not always centralized)

Aside from .doc, I cannot think of any examples of MIME types that
provide greater specificity than extensions.

Neither system is perfect, but extensions, in my experience anyway, have
been less vague.

> If the question had been "Why", my answer would have been that MIME
> types (or Content Types) have a central registry, so that the
> interpretation of the type is indepentent of applications, and
> operating system environments.
> 
> There are more possible interpretations to ".doc" than MSWord files.

Again, aside from .doc, I cannot think of other significant examples of 
extension collision.  MIME's structured, categorized approach is attractive,
but there seem to be too many generalizations (for me, anyway), and 
inconsistencies (I can never remember which MIME types use ".vnd", or "x-").

(I reserve the right to be wrong.)  ;)

-Brian



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