At 9:11 -0700 2/06/05, Ned Freed wrote:
I'd like to push back gently on the change from 'text' to 'video', just to test the waters.
The media types 'video' and 'audio' express what you *get* if you decode the stream, not how it is *encoded*. They're not call 'float' or 'integer' or 'huffman', for example. Yet for some reason we want to reserve the media type 'text' for those that express their encoding in printable text, without regard for what they are expressing; this seems inconsistent.
No, that's not it at all. The restrictions on the text type have to do with the nature of the underlying data, not with how it is encoded. For example, there's plenty of use of text types, including text/plain, that requires binary encoding and cannot be accomodated by either 7bit or 8bit encodings.
There are, however, more restrictions on text that then are on other top-level types. The fact that there are more restrictions may seem inconsistent, but that's how this stuff was defined long ago and it is way too late to change it.
I don't believe that everything expressed in say XML ought to be considered a 'text' media type, for example.
It's more likely that *nothing* expressed in XML would be considered to be a text media type.
Ned
Thanks, but now I am lost. Why is this a 'video' stream and not a 'text' stream, then? -- David Singer Apple Computer/QuickTime