At 1:28 PM -0700 4/26/97, John C Klensin wrote:
> (ii) For MARC records, I suspect the situation is much
>like some of what we've found for EDI. The important thing
>may be to distinguish things that are MARC records from
>things that aren't, then to pass the former off to
John, your reply causes me to suspect I was insufficiently clear.
Nothing you said disagrees with what I was saying, but there is a chance
that a reader might wind up a bit confused by the end of reading our two
messages. In particular your point about smarter applications.
I was distinguishing between mime-receiving applications, such as
email user agents and browsers, versus content-knowledgeable applications.
The former does dispatching and the latter does processing. (Yes,
they can be merged, but I'm playing with an abstract model here, which
happens also to have physical reality for all those data types not
implemented inside the mime s/w.)
Anyhow, I don't think there's a problem with the mime model merely,
as you say, a need to be clear about how it works. And how it works is
that dispatching to a content-knowledgeable application is done by MIME
content type/subtype and not by use of parameters.
This was in fact the reason for 3 different EDI mime types, rather
than one.
d/
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