I'm obviously missing something very fundamental here. If I have a document
foo.xml on my file system and it contains:
<FOO>Plugh! Y2?</FOO>
that's all. What sort of file is it? It is not self identifying. However
it's a legal XML file. Suppose I know that and I want to process it as XML,
I need to be able to tell software that it is XML.
If we tell the software that it is of type "text/xml" this is understood by
millions of browsers over the world. If I refer to it by:
<!NOTATION XML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XML Version 1.0//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml-971117">
then I do not know any software in the world that will work out what the
file type is.
My point is that browsers and mailers use MIME types. They don't use FPIs.
Unless the file includes its own MIME type, how do I find the MIME type of
a file using NOTATION, especially when the file is not on a server but on
local filestore? I can't see the objection to telling software what the
MIME type of a file is :-)
P.
>
> --
David------------------------------------------+----------------------------
>David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu| david@dynamicDiagrams.com
>Boston University Computer Science | Dynamic Diagrams
>http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ | http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
> | MAPA: mapping for the WWW
>
Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg