MIME types and file extensions for XML

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 17:46 08/06/98 +1000, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
[...]
>
>You can also apply to the IETF and get  your own
>registration tree. So Microsoft, for example,
>could apply for "ms": then they could have
>"appplication/ms-rml". (But no-one has done this yet,
>so it perhaps involves too much effort to be 
>a viable alternative.)

FWIW, 2-3 years ago Henry, Ben Whitaker and I submitted a draft for MIME
types of the form:
chemical/*
There was a lot of discussion on the IETF list about whether this was a
Good Thing. We had some support and some dissent :-). In the event it
lapsed. However the molecular community universally uses:
chemical/x-foo
to describe files of type foo. AFAIK this has not broken any software, but
maybe a time will come when the s/w checks the toplevel types. The message
- which I don't suggest we elaborate on here - is that MIME is not robust
with regard to uniquifying mime types. The message is that we have to make
sure we don't repeat the mistake with namespaces - i.e. we should have
uniquifiable planetwide names.

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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