>I do believe that, someday, someone should try to write up an >up-to-date description of the difference that recognizes the >fact that compressed files are in use as media types with >application/zip (in assorted spellings) and application/gzip >(from this spec and in assorted spellings) as examples. But I >now believe it is a separate task that should not block this >document or registration. I'll be happy to do that if I can ever find enough spare time to write it. You're right, it would be nice if there were some way to distinguish containers from content in MIME types. But given the existing historical mess, and that some kinds of compression are just a different way to encode a bunch of bits (zlib) whereas others are more like a small filesystem (zip and tgz), even if we could start with a clean sheet it's not obvious to me what would be the best thing to do. R's, John