Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

RFC 2046 does not define the term "internet media type" #155

Open
GPHemsley opened this issue Sep 6, 2021 · 2 comments
Open

RFC 2046 does not define the term "internet media type" #155

GPHemsley opened this issue Sep 6, 2021 · 2 comments

Comments

@GPHemsley
Copy link
Member

GPHemsley commented Sep 6, 2021

Section 4.1 states:

A MIME type represents an internet media type as defined by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types. It can also be referred to as a MIME type record. [MIMETYPE]

Note: Standards are encouraged to consistently use the term MIME type to avoid confusion with the use of media type as described in Media Queries. [MEDIAQUERIES]

However, RFC 2046 ("[MIMETYPE]") does not define the term "internet media type".

This definition of "MIME type" was introduced in cc81ec4.

Previously, the corresponding text read:

The MIME type of a resource is a technical hint about the use and format
of that resource. [MIMETYPE]

Note: A MIME type is sometimes called an Internet media type in protocol literature, but
consistently using the term MIME type avoids confusion with the use of "media type" as
described in the Media Queries CSS specification. [MEDIAQUERIES-4]

(Both before and after this change, the media-type production in RFC 7231 is used to define a "valid MIME type (string)", which is a separate concept.)

@GPHemsley
Copy link
Member Author

GPHemsley commented Sep 11, 2021

It's possible that 2f83f87 muddied the waters here, because it lost the distinction between normative and non-normative references. (The reference to [MIMETYPE] was meant to be non-normative.)

@annevk
Copy link
Member

annevk commented Sep 13, 2021

On the one hand it makes sense for it to be non-normative as there's nothing there we need implementations to implement, but then we would need a definition that stands on its own. As it stands it seems more like a normative dependency, at least for the "meaning" part.

I suspect Ian prefixed it with "internet" since the IETF came up with that definition, but not sure. Seems fine to drop it.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants