• To: "Amelia A Lewis" <amyzing@t...>
• Subject: Re: [Summary, VERSION #2] Media type (MIME) of XML in MS Word? in Notepad? when compressed? etc
• From: "Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@a...>
• Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 14:00:06 +1000 (EST)
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <b5d82fbc2c0b8811ce8d417fea10c68a@a...>
• References: <448F513D.8030206@z...> <b5d82fbc2c0b8811ce8d417fea10c68a@a...>
• User-agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.2

Amelia A Lewis said:

> So ... when an application is opening a file in a file system, it
> typically won't care what the MIME type associated with that file is.  In
> most cases, it either isn't given (and can't get) that metadata, or it
> just *doesn't care*.  Most Windows programs care not at all about MIME
> types (they care about extensions, as Roger and Rick have noted); likewise
> programs written for MacOS didn't/don't care (they care about the
> four-letter type code).
>
> You can *say* that they map to MIME types, if you'd like, and if it's
> useful conceptually, but in fact, they don't.  They're oblivious to MIME
> types.

And, in the case of graphics files at least on Windows (IE) it is more
complicated than that: a JPEG or a GIF extension can both be sent to the
same graphics handlers. So a file can be mislabelled (e.g. a GIF file
labelled with a JPEG extension) and still be rendered correctly, based on
information inside the file.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

• References:
  • Re: [Summary, VERSION #2] Media type (MIME) of XML in MSWord? in Notepad? when compressed? etc
    • From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>
  • Re: [Summary, VERSION #2] Media type (MIME) of XML in MS Word? in Notepad? when compressed? etc
    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@t...>

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