MIME subclasses

[Jonathan Blandford]

Thomas Leonard <tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes:

> While thinking about the syntax for subclassing MIME types
> (application/x-python > text/plain > application/octet-stream) some more,
> it occurred to me that a syntax already exists for this.

Did I miss a discussion on adding additional subclassing to MIME Types?
They already have a natural inheritance.  For example, text/plain is
already text, and image/gif is also an image.  The fact that people
rarely use this information leads me to think that this subclassing is a
bad fit.  I don't see what saying that text/plain is also
application/octet-stream actually buys us?  What is the problem we're
solving here?

Thanks,
-Jonathan