🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1iqov1INNivb@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> trier@odin.ins.cwru.edu (Stephen C. Trier) writes:
>Well, as has been said, MIME is in use in the Gopher community, where it
>is defined as "a file starting with MIME headers".  I have heard suggestions
>for its use with WAIS, though I think that idea fizzled.  It works with
>Gopher because Gopher already presumes that all text transactions are done
>in US-ASCII or a superset like ISO-8859-1.  Gopher also provides for 8-bit
>binary data.  I don't know which of the two is used by MIME.

"Well, there you go again..."

I suppose I'm beating a dead horse, but ...

The Gopher project equates the gopher type M with the MIME message/rfc822 content-type.
While the message/rfc822 content type can contain a body of any type, I'd like
to see the gopher project go a little farther: dispense with the single character
data type namespace alltogether in favor of the MIME namespace. (i.e. no more I
for images: put "image/gif" in the gopher listing in stead. But the data stays
the same: you don't add headers or base64 encode it.) At least formally equate
the rest of the single-character types with MIME types (excepting the single-character
types that refer to protocols, like telnet and CSO).

The WAIS project leaders have said they are going to do "the right thing." i.e.
not just include the message/rfc822 content-type in their type namespace (as "MIME")
but replace their namespace with the MIME namespace. So no more WAIS "TEXT" type:
it's "TEXT/PLAIN", and no more "GIF", but rather "IMAGE/GIF" and no more "PS" but
in stead "application/postscript".

Dan