Dear Valdis, Thanks for your reply! If I understand this correctly, defining Y as: 1. "a MIME media type value indicating the type of a resource" results in: "text" 2. "a concatenation of MIME media-type, subtype and parameters indicating the type of a resource" results in: "text/xml; charset=utf-8" 3. "a MIME content-type value indicating the type of a resource" results in: "Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8" Regards Jeroen Bekaert > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-ietf@xxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-ietf@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of > Valdis.Kletnieks@xxxxxx > Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2003 8:34 PM > To: Jeroen Bekaert > Cc: ietf@xxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: media type? > > On Thu, 27 Nov 2003 18:32:50 MST, Jeroen Bekaert > <jeroen.bekaert@xxxxxxxx> said: > > > As such, a possible value of Y could be "text/xml; charset=utf-8"? > > > As such, a possible value of Y could be: "text" > > You want media-type to be "text" with a subtype of "xml" and > a parameter "charset=utf-8". > > I don't see any way to use the BNF of RFC2046, section 5.1 to get any > other parse. In fact, further down in section 5, it says: > > type of data. Thus, a media type of "image/xyz" is enough to tell > a > user agent that the data is an image, even if the user agent has > no > knowledge of the specific image format "xyz". Such information > can > be used, for example, to decide whether or not to show a user the > raw > data from an unrecognized subtype -- such an action might be > reasonable for unrecognized subtypes of text, but not for > unrecognized subtypes of image or audio. For this reason, > registered > > So the intent is to have the media-type say "this is text" or "this > is an > image" or "this is a sound" or "this is a composite", and so on, so > that an MUA > can make a vague guess as to what do with it even if it has no clue > at all what > to do with the specific subtype or parameters. For instance, an MUA > would be > within it's rights to refused to deal with *any* flavor of text/* > (including > even text/plain) if it included a 'charset=' parameter it didn't know > how to > deal with. As an example, displaying *any* sort of Big5 text on a > display that > is ascii/8859-* only is basically doomed... >