[gopher] Re: Item Type Suggestions

[Cameron Kaiser <spectre@floodgap.com>]

> I'm afraid at some point we can lose distinction between "gopher item 
> types" and "MIME types" which are not initially the same, and merging 
> them we lose "gopher types" as one of main gopher concepts.
> 
> As for case with CSS and XML, you mentioned that distinction of MIME 
> types is necessary for the client to know which application should be 
> run to handle an item. However, both CSS and XML are typically handled 
> with the same application as HTML, i.e. web browser, so they actually 
> could be put under h itemtype (HTML).

Here's the problem with that, though: the browser thinks in MIME types.
To get the proper MIME type out of a file that could be arbitrarily CSS,
XML *or* HTML, you'd need to resort to content sniffing or extension
grokking, which is what I want to avoid.

I'm fully in agreement with your first paragraph, but for certain tasks a
1:1 mapping is going to be unavoidable from an expediency point of view.
At least for this specific case I cannot see a way of avoiding it.

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  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser@floodgap.com
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