--On Friday, May 04, 2012 19:26 -0700 Ned Freed <ned.freed@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> 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. > > This is further complicated by the fact that there are now a > number of types defined that are actually zip with specific > semantics attached to the content. There are also types > defined for use only within such containers. With the wonderful advantage of hindsight, it might have been better to define compound Content-Types/Media Types or a universal encoding parameter rather than trying to separate C-T-E out. The first might have given us, e.g., application/foo+base64 and 'application/bar+xml+gzip' or 'application/bar+xml+gzip+base64'; the second something like application/foo; encoding="base64" and 'application/bar+xml; encoding=gzip+base64'. Obviously a little late now :-( And, again, not a blocking issue for this document, one way or the other. john