> >I second the motion for using MIME-ish headers, and vote vehemently > >against XML for them, on the grounds that 1) they're way overkill and 2) > >no one else uses them _as headers_ anyway, AFAIK (tho I havent kept up > >with the latest http spec). > > Consider: the same file could be thought of in many ways: > > audio file > mp3 file > mp3 non-streaming file > mp3 33kbs non-streaming file > mp3 33kbs non-streaming stereo file > mp3 33kbs non-streaming stereo file by Verge > mp3 33kbs non-streaming stereo file by Verge on Little Idiot > > MIME can't represent this in such detail.
There are different types of metadata, though (exhaustively categorized on this list previously). For some purposes, it Just Doesn't Matter. In my Freenet web browser, for example, I don't give a damn who wrote the song, I just want to know its format so I can play it! And I don't want to parse a mountain of XML to find out. A header of Content-type: audio/x-wav suits me just fine. If you want searchability, add your XML description alongside the file. But please don't cram it in the headers when we have a perfectly good standard system of identifying types which everyone already supports. (As for suffixes, ask Netscape why it keeps trying to play Linux RPM's as RealAudio files. =) theo _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
