On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 03:56:31 +0100, Alex Milowski <[email protected]>
wrote:
In reading through the current draft of XMLHttpRequest [1] I see a
consistent use of the term 'MIME type' instead of 'Media Type' as
defined by RFC 2046 [2]. RFC 2046 does not define the term 'MIME
type' and only refers to 'MIME Media Type' once within the RFC
document. Otherwise, it would seem the proper term is 'Media Type'.
Further, the 'Content-Type' header used to type the MIME entity as
described as:
"The Content-Type field is used to specify the nature of the data in
the body of a MIME entity, by giving media type and subtype
identifiers, and by providing auxiliary information that may be
required for certain media types."
Again, it would seem the value is a 'Media Type' and not a 'MIME
type'. I think it would be preferred for this specification and RFC
2046 agreed on the data type name for the value of the Content-Type
header.
As the terminology section states I am using MIME type per HTML5. The
reasons why that specification uses that term are described here:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/infrastructure.html#mime-type
If you disagree with those reasons you can file a bug against HTML5 and
get the HTML WG to look at it. To make it not too much of a Kafkaesque
process I am willing to provide assistance if you wish to do that and need
help.
[1] http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/XMLHttpRequest/
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2046
--
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/
