Proposal for a MIME mapping spec

Billy Biggs vektor at dumbterm.net
Thu Jul 8 17:34:45 EEST 2004


  Hi Jonathan, thanks for posting the proposal.  Good stuff.

  I have a small suggestion:

> [...] The 'MimeType' field in that desktop file includes a list of
> every MIME Type that that application can handle.  For example, a PDF
> viewer could have the following entry:
> 
> MimeType: application/pdf
> 
> Applications that can handle multiple MIME Types would list all of the
> ones it can handle in a ';' separated list.  [...]

  I would suggest not to use a semi-colon as a delimiter in the list,
since this is used to supply parameters in a MIME type as described in
RFC2045.  Instead, why not use a comma-separated list to follow the
convention of protocols like HTTP?

  An example of where parameters are used would be like:
text/plan;charset=us-ascii.  While I cannot think of any really
important use of parameters in selecting an appropriate application, it
seems like a natural way to allow for extensibility.

  -Billy





More information about the xdg mailing list