On Sat, 30 Aug 2003 15:26:38 +0859, Masataka Ohta said: > MIME is too much e-mail centric. For an E-mail centric protocol, it's worked pretty well on port 80.... > On most OSes, including but not limited to UNIX, that's the way to > designate content types of files. But it's not *universally* true, so you have to come up with some sideband way of conveying information. And in fact, even if two systems both support extensions as a *mandatory* flagging, you can still run into trouble - what if the two systems don't use the *same* extension for a filetype that should be portable? Should a postscript file end in .PS, .ps, .PST? Should a VisualBasic script be .VB or .VBS? Is a image/jpeg file a .JPG or .JPEG? And if extensions are non-mandatory, it's just a mess. Think about the security implications of "Here's an executable called foo.JPG" (Microsoft didn't - that's the basic cause of MS03-032). > Instead, MIME developers arrogantly claimed that OSes should be > modified to support MIME content-type (and even that text files > on OSes should use MIME format to support other tags such as > charset). No. This claim is right up there with "SMTP developers arrogantly claimed that OSs should be modified to support network-standard EOL". And of course they didn't. They merely insisted that the user agent at either end convert to/from the local format.
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