MIME info spec: Handling containers/multiple MIME types per glob pattern

[Rodney Dawes]

On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 21:12 +0100, Christian Neumair wrote:
> [1] proposes to introduce application/x-foo MIME types for the various
> contents, and use application/ogg as a their parent, thus using
> application/ogg as container type, but - if there was an API for
> determining whether multiple patterns are associated with a particular
> file name - informing that further investigation (sniffing) is required
> for determining the contents type. One of the x-foo types will match, et
> voila, we got the type.

Can we please avoid adding more application/foo types for things that
aren't appllications? audio/x-ogg and video/x-ogg-theora would be much
better.

> Also note that the pattern "*.pot" matches gettext templates and PPT
> presentations. The MIME type can also only be determined sniffing the
> contents.

I'm sure there are lots of cases where the same extension gets used for
multiple file types. Is there any particular reason we should tell the
application that it needs to rescan the MIME type by sniffing instead?
Can we not just always sniff the first N bytes of the file, by doing
what the "file" program does to sniff metadata? It seems like this would
solve a lot of problems, and I doubt it would cause any significant
performance issues.

-- dobey