[gopher] Re: Item Type Suggestions

[Cameron Kaiser <spectre@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Particularly for XML, CSS and RSS which may be hosted on a gopher server, 
> > using 0 for these despite being text/* could quite possibly be seen always
> > as text/plain and not further interpreted by an external viewer, which is
> > probably not what we want.
> 
> Why would this type of content be suitable for a gopher server?  If I
> had XML, CSS, and RSS to serve up, it certainly wouldn't be done via
> gopher.

Realistically, why not? It's just another file. In fact, this whole thing
came up precisely because of an XML and CSS file that wasn't getting a correct
item type (Mozilla was content-sniffing it, but this broke in Overbite which
has a rigid 1:1 mapping).

I realize that assigning item types for every possible file and/or MIME type
doesn't scale, but from a technical perspective, people are serving these
files already -- if we support HTML, then we should be supporting what comes
with it and at a minimum that will be CSS. The item type space is small, so
it's more of an aspect of picking and choosing what is important to nail
exactly for purposes of picking the appropriate viewer, and subsuming the
rest under generic codes or 9. If we're always relying on the client to do
the right thing and not hinting it with an exact or at least more specific
type mapping, that makes for more ungainly clients.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser@xxxxxxxxxxxx
-- God made the integers; all else is the work of Man. -- Kronecker -----------