Re: About the media types text/x-php and text/x-php-source

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Vincent Lefevre writes ("Re: About the media types text/x-php and text/x-php-source"):
> On 2012-08-28 04:32:18 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> > On Mon, 2012-08-27 at 11:03 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > > On 2012-08-26 19:55:49 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> > > > Now obviously there's a small border; I guess IETF's idea is:
> > > > "Can it be exectued/interpreted directly or by some interpreter? Then
> > > > application/*"

This is the wrong way to think of it.  The right way is "is it
intended by the sender to be executed by the recipient _as part of
display of the message_" ?

For programming language source code this will rarely be the case.

If the source file is intended to be executed as part of displaying
the message then application/* is right because showing the source as
text will not do what the sender intended.  If not then text/* is
right because what's wanted is to show the source code to the
recipient and a fallback to plain text display (rather than say a
fancy syntax highligher or IDE) is correct.

Ian.