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Hi Sounds like this light subject seems to become more and more serious :-)) Frank said: A file type is defined by its mime type not by it's suffix. Didier replies: Yes mostly in the case of an HTTP or SMTP transaction where the MIME type is either necessary or sufficient. But the MIME type is not necessary in the context of some desktop?s file management where the file extension may be more important since it is used to associate the right program to a file type. For instance, xml spy can be associated to all the ?.xml? files and thus when the user double click on an xml file, xml Spy is automatically started. In this last case, the MIME type is irrelevant. So, to go back to the original problem, notepad save the xml document as text not as xml. Since notepad is present on the windows platform, the ?.txt? files are associated to notepad, not the ?.xml?. To do so, the system registry has to be modified so that the ?.xml? file extension is associated to the notepad program. To the person who originally asked this question, one word of advice: ?go get an xml editor?, when you edit an xml document at least you won?t have to remember all the tags and where they go. A good editor will help you by showing the appropriate tags in a context menu or in a list and you?ll get other useful features too. Frank said: The suffix (txt, htm,asp, ppf, cfm) is a convenient way for an application to decide which files to send to a processor, and which not. Didier replies: Yes but on some platforms the extension is used to retrieve the MIME type. For instance on Windows, the file extension may be used to retrieve the MIME type. On other platform like Linux, this is not the case but, in this context, the extension can be used to recognize a particular vocabulary or simply the format. For instance, a docbook (the Linux documentation is based on a Docbook like format) document based on SGML can easily be recognized if the extension is ".sgml" and if the document is based on xml, then the extension ".xml" convey enough information to indicate that we are dealing with an XML document. Conclusion: on some platforms, the extension may be useful to retrieve the MIME type, or it could be useful for human beings to convey some information about the file's content. In the context of HTTP server however, you?ll need most of the time (at least on several HTTP server present on the market) the file extension to associate to it the right MIME type. The HTTP server, need that information to insert the right ?content-type? HTTP header. Otherwise, without that the HTTP server will have to deduce the file MIME type with some magic (and in this case the magic has a cost: time) So, from the pragmatic point of view, the file extension is more important than it seems at first sight. Hope we all came back to earth now and that our fellow who asked the question at first will buy an xml editor :-) cheer Didier PH Martin mailto: martind@n... Book: XML Professional (Wrox) Articles: xml.com Conference: Wireless One (Las Vegas)
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