Garret Wilson wrote:
I don't have a strong opinion here, but I will point out that RFC 2046
talks about the category being "the highest level" division and that
it is "useful". To me, it is useful at a high level to note that the
content types discussed here have the following characteristics:
* The content bytes are interpreted as text characters (i.e. Unicode
code points); ignoring encoding, no bytes are interpreted as anything
other than text characters. (These text characters may later be
subject to some meta-interpretation---e.g. delimiters---but they are
first interpreted as text characters.)
* These content types can always be edited in a text editor.
* Abstract values, such as numbers, are represented by their text
lexical forms, not by some non-text encoding.
Oh, and I forgot to add (perhaps most importantly):
* I can allow CVS or Subversion or some other version control system
manage the file as text, not binary, even able to do diffs and merges
based upon end-of-line characters.
To me, that's where the power of the text/* types come in---we can do
processing on them as text.
Garret
