On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:03 PM, Dan Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Very useful ideas. I agreed with the notion of content transfer encoding as > well. Thanks.
(short guide to MIME typing) there are 6 base MIME headers (see RFC 2045) MIME-Version (in practice always 1.0) Content-Type (media type and subtype eg image/png) Content-Transfer-Encoding (eg BASE64) Content-ID (used for referencing) Content-Description (not machine readable) plus any number of standard extensions in addition to media type and subtype, any number of parameters may be included in the Content-Type header value. may parameters are standards for example: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii media type and subtype are - in general - too broad to allow decoding without magic without parameters. for example, a document which is uses charset shift-jis cannot be decoded just from text/plain. another example - a multipart messages cannot be decoded without it's boundary parameters. full support for MIME typing requires meta-data support (headers) but Content-Transfer-Encoding and Content-Type should satisfy most common cases. - robert
