Internet Engineering Task Force L. Masinter
Internet-Draft Adobe
Intended status: Informational October 25, 2010
Expires: April 28, 2011
MIME and the Web
draft-masinter-mime-web-info-01
Abstract
This document describes some of the ways in which parts of the MIME
system, originally designed for electronic mail, have been used in
the Web, and some of the ways in which those uses have resulted in
difficulties. Given this background and justification, this document
then goes on to outline requirements for changes to MIME registries
and practices for their use within W3C and IETF, in order to address
those difficulties. Within IETF, a companion Best Current Practice
document will be developed to specifically make some changes to the
Internet Media Types and Charset registries.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 28, 2011.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Origins of MIME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. Introducing MIME into the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.3. Distributed Extensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Problems with application to the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. Lack of clarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2. Differences between email and Web delivery . . . . . . . . 6
3.3. The Rules Weren't Quite Followed . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.4. Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.5. The Down Side of Extensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4. Additional considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.1. There are related problems with charsets . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2. Embedded, downloaded, launch independent application . . . 9
4.3. Additional Use Cases: Polyglot and Multiview . . . . . . . 9
4.4. Evolution, Versioning, Forking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.5. Content Negotiation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.6. Fragment identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5. Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5.1. Internet Media Type registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1.1. MIME registry magic numbers for sniffing . . . . . . . 12
5.1.2. Scripting and scriptable content safety . . . . . . . 12
5.1.3. Fragment identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1.4. Application info . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1.5. File extensions in registry . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.2. Sniffing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.2.1. Sniffing uses Media Type magic number . . . . . . . . 13
5.2.2. Sniffing when there are multiple different
definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.2.3. Sniffing charsets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.2.4. Sniffing security uses scriptability info . . . . . . 13
5.3. Changes to IANA processes for MIME registries . . . . . . 13
5.4. FTP specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.5. Update some URI definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.6. Changes to W3C findings, processes . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
9. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
1. Introduction
This document was initially prompted by a set of discussions about
Web architecture and the difficulties surrounding evolution of the
Web, Internet Media types, multiple specifications for a single media
type, and related discussions.
The document gives some of the history of MIME and its introduction
and use in the web Section 2. It then describes some of the current
difficulties with the use of MIME in the web context Section 3. This
background and context is then followed by a description of changes
which would reduce some of those difficulties; the changes involve
specifications, practices, and registries within IETF and W3C
Section 5. In particular, changes to the registry and maintenance
procedures for MIME-related registries maintained by IANA are
describes.
Currently, discussion of this document is suggested on the mailing
list www-tag@w3c.org (mailing list open for subscription to all),
archives at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/.
NOTE: This document is still quite rough; some of the facts need to
be checked, many sections still need expansion. Any help with
references and such appreciated.
2. History
2.1. Origins of MIME
MIME ("Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions") was invented
originally for email, based on general principles of "messaging" (a
foundational architecture framework). The role of MIME was to extend
Internet email messaging from ASCII-only plain text, to include other
character sets, images, rich documents, etc.) [RFC1521], [RFC1522].
The basic architecture of complex content messaging is:
o Message sent from A to B.
o Message includes some data. Sender A includes standard 'headers'
telling recipient B enough information that recipient B knows how
sender A intends the message to be interpreted.
o Recipient B gets the message, interprets the headers for the data
and uses it as information on how to interpret the data.
MIME is a "tagging and bagging" specification:
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
tagging: How to label content so the intent of how the content
should be interpreted is known.
bagging: How to wrap the content so the label is clear, or, if there
are multiple parts to a single message, how to combine them.
"MIME types" (renamed "Internet Media Types" in later specs
[RFC2046]) are part of the "tagging" -- a way to describe the content
of a message so that it could be used to initiate interpretation of a
message. The "Internet Media Type registry" (MIME type registry) is
where someone can tell the world what a particular label means, as
far as the sender's intent of how recipients should process a message
of that type, and the description of a recipients capability and
ability for senders.
2.2. Introducing MIME into the Web
The original World Wide Web (the 0.9 version of HTTP, see [RFC1945])
didn't have "tagging and bagging" -- everything sent via HTTP was
assumed to be HTML. However, at the time (early 1990's) other
distributed information access systems, including Gopher (distributed
menu system) and WAIS (remote access to document databases) were
adding capabilities for accessing many things other text and
hypertext and the WWW folks were considering type tagging. It was
agreed that HTTP should use MIME as the vocabulary for talking about
file types and character sets. The result was that HTTP 1.0 added
the "content-type" header, following (more or less) MIME. Later, for
content negotiation, additional uses of this technology (in 'Accept'
headers) were also added.
The differences between the use of Internet Media Types between email
and HTTP have minor:
o default charset: HTTP specified ISO-8859-1 as the default
character set, not US-ASCII
o requirement for CRLF in plain text: in practice, web clients
didn't restrict content to use CRLF in text/* MIME bodies.
These minor differences have caused a lot of trouble.
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
2.3. Distributed Extensibility
The real advantage of using Internet Media Types to label content
meant that the Web was no longer restricted to a single format. This
one addition meant expanding from Global Hypertext to Global
Hypermedia (as suggested in a 1992 email [connolly92])
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| The Internet currently serves as the backbone for a global |
| hypertext. FTP and email provided a good start, and the gopher, |
| WWW, or WAIS clients and servers make wide area information |
| browsing simple. These systems even interoperate, with email |
| servers talking to FTP servers, WWW clients talking to gopher |
| servers, on and on. |
| This currently works quite well for text. But what should WWW |
| clients do as Gopher and WAIS servers begin to serve up pictures, |
| sounds, movies, spreadsheet templates, postscript files, etc.? |
| It would be a shame for each to adopt its own multimedia typing |
| system. |
| If they all adopt the MIME typing system (and as many other |
| features from MIME as are appropriate), we can step from global |
| hypertext to global hypermedia that much easier. |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
The fact that HTTP could reliably transport images of different
formats, for example, allowed NCSA to add
to HTML. MIME
allowed other document formats (Word, PDF, Postscript) and other
kinds of hypermedia, as well as other applications, to be part of the
Web. MIME was arguably the most important extensibility mechanism in
the Web.
3. Problems with application to the Web
Unfortunately, while the use of Internet Media Types for the Web
added incredible power, a number of problems have arisen.
3.1. Lack of clarity
Many people are confused about the purpose of MIME in the Web, its
uses, the meaning of Internet Media Types. Many W3C specifications
TAG findings and Internet Media Type registrations make what are
incorrect assumptions about the meaning and purposes of a Internet
Media Type registration.
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
3.2. Differences between email and Web delivery
Some of the differences between the application contexts of email and
Web delivery determine different requirements:
o In the Web, the transfer of data is initiated differently than in
email: the "messages" with labeled content are usually HTTP
responses to a specific (GET) request (although the request is
itself a message, GET has no content). In the most common case,
then, the receiver knows more about the data before it has been
sent.
o Clients would like to know more about the content before they
retrieve it. The "tagging" is often not sufficient to know, for
example, "can I interpret this if I retrieve it", because of
versioning, capabilities, or dependencies on things like screen
size or interaction capabilities of the recipient.
o Some content isn't delivered over the HTTP (files on local file
system), or there is no opportunity for tagging (data delivered
over FTP) and in those cases, some other ways are needed for
determining file type.
Operating systems use (and continued to evolve) different systems to
determine the 'type' of something, different from the MIME tagging
and bagging:
o 'magic numbers': in many contexts, file types could be guessed
pretty reliably by looking for headers.
o Originally MAC OS had a 4 character 'file type' and another 4
character 'creator code' for file types.
o Windows evolved to use the "file extension" -- 3 letters (and then
more) at the end of the file name -- as the initial determination
of the oveall type of a file. This practice has now extended to
other systems.
Information about these other ways of determining type (rather than
by the content-type label) were gathered for the Internet Media Type
registry; those registering types are encouraged to also describe
'magic numbers', Mac file type, common file extensions. However,
since there was no formal use of that information, the quality of
that information in the registry is haphazard.
Finally, there was the fact that tagging and bagging might be OK for
unilaterally initiated (one-way) messaging, you might want to know
whether you could handle the data before reading it in and
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
interpreting it, but the Internet Media Types weren't enough to tell.
3.3. The Rules Weren't Quite Followed
The behavior of the community when the Internet Media Type registry
was designed hasn't matched expectations:
o Lots of file types aren't registered (no entry in IANA for file
types).
o Those that are, the registration is incomplete or incorrect
(people doing registration didn't understand 'magic number' or
other fields).
o The actual content deployed or created by deployed software
doesn't match the registration.
In particular, Web implementations of Internet Media Types diverged
from expected behavior:
o Browser implementors would be liberal in what they accepted, and
use what looked like a file extension in the URL and/or magic
number or other 'sniffing' techniques to decide file type, without
assuming content-label was authoritative. This was necessary
anyway for files that weren't delivered by HTTP.
o HTTP server implementors and administrators didn't supply ways of
easily associating the 'intended' file type label with the file,
resulting in files frequently being delivered with a label other
than the one they would have chosen if they'd thought about it,
and if browsers *had* assumed content-type was authoritative.
Some popular servers had default configuration files that treated
any unknown type as "text/plain" (plain ext in ASCII). Since it
didn't matter (the browsers worked anyway), it was hard to get
this fixed.
Incorrect senders coupled with liberal readers wind up feeding a
negative feedback loop based on the robustness principle
([WikiRobust], [RFC3117]).
3.4. Consequences
The result, alas, is that increased unreliability, in that
o servers sending responses to browsers don't have a good guarantee
that the browser won't "sniff" the content and decide to do
something other than treat it as it is labeled
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
o browsers receiving content don't have a good guarantee that the
content isn't mis-labeled
o intermediaries (gateways, proxies, caches, and other pieces of the
Web infrastructure) don't have a good way of telling what the
conversation means.
This ambiguity and 'sniffing' also applies to packaged content in
webapps ('bagging' but using ZIP rather than MIME multipart). (NOTE:
NEEDS EXPANSION, REFERENCE TO WEBAPPS)
3.5. The Down Side of Extensibility
Extensibility adds great power, and allows the Web to evolve without
committee approval of every extension. For some (those who want to
extend and their clients who want those extensions), this is power!
For others (those who are building Web components or infrastructure),
extensibility is a drawback -- it adds to the unreliability and
difference of the Web experience. When senders use extensions
recipients aren't aware of, implement incorrectly or incompletely,
then communication often fails. With messaging, this is a serious
problem, although most 'rich text' documents are still delivered in
multiple forms (using multipart/alternative).
If your job is to support users of a popular browser, however, where
each user has installed a different configuration of file handlers
and extensibility mechanisms, MIME may appear to add unnecessary
complexity and variable experience for users of all but the most
popular types.
4. Additional considerations
This section notes some additional considerations.
4.1. There are related problems with charsets
MIME includes provisions not only for file 'types', but also,
importantly the "character encoding" used by text types: for example,
simple US ASCII, Western European ISO-8859-1, Unicode UTF8. A
similar vicious cycle also happened with character set labels:
mislabeled content happily processed correctly by liberal browsers
encouraged more and more sites to proliferate text with mis-labeled
character sets, to the point where browsers feel they *have* to guess
the wrong label. (NEEDS EXPANSION)
There are sites that intentionally label content as iso-2022-jp or
euc-jp when it is in fact one of the Microsoft extension charsets
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
(e.g., for access to circled digits. This is an intentional misuse
of the definitions of the charsets themselves -- definitions which
originated at the national standards body level.
4.2. Embedded, downloaded, launch independent application
The type of a document might be determined not only for entire
documents "HTML" vs "Word" vs "PDF", but also to embedded components
of documents, "JPEG image" vs. "PNG image". However, the use cases,
requirements and likely operational impact of MIME handling is likely
different for those use cases.
4.3. Additional Use Cases: Polyglot and Multiview
There are some interesting additional use cases which add to the
design requirements:
o "Polyglot" documents: A 'polyglot' document is one which is some
data which can be treated as two different Internet Media Types,
in the case where the meaning of the data is the same. This is
part of a transition strategy to allow content providers (senders)
to manage, produce, store, deliver the same data, but with two
different labels, and have it work equivalently with two different
kinds of receivers (one of which knows one Internet Media Type,
and another which knows a second one.) This use case was part of
the transition strategy from HTML to an XML-based XHTML, and also
as a way of a single service offering both HTML-based and XML-
based processing (e.g., same content useful for news articles and
Web pages.
o "Multiview" documents: This use case seems similar but it's quite
different. In this case, the same data has very different meaning
when served as two different content-types, but that difference is
intentional; for example, the same data served as text/html is a
document, and served as an RDFa type is some specific data.
4.4. Evolution, Versioning, Forking
The subject of format/language/type evolution is complex; this
section is a litle terse.
Formats and their specifications evolve over time. There are several
reasons for the evolution: innovation, compatibility with other
implementations, attempts to gain control.
Some times new evolutions are "compatible", although compatibility
has several variations. It is part of the responsibility of the
designer of a new version of a file type to try to insure both
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
forward and backward compatibility: new documents work reasonably
(with some fallback) with old viewers and that old documents work
reasonably with new viewers. In some cases this is accomplished,
others not; in some cases, "works reasonably" is softened to "either
works reasonably or gives clear warning about nature of problem
(version mismatch)."
In MIME, the 'tag', the Internet Media Type, corresponds to the
versioned series. Internet Media Types do not identify a particular
version of a file format. Rather, the general idea is that the
Internet Media Type identifies the family, and also how you're
supposed to otherwise find version information on a per-format basis.
Many (most) file formats have an internal version indicator, with the
idea that you only need a new Internet Media Type to designate a
completely incompatible format. The notion of an "Internet Media
Type" is very course-grained. The general approach to this has been
that the actual Media Type includes provisions for version
indicator(s) embedded in the content itself to determine more
precisely the nature of how the data is to be interpreted. That is,
the message itself contains further information.
Unfortunately, lots has gone wrong in this scenario as well --
processors ignoring version indicators encouraging content creators
to not be careful to supply correct version indicators, leading to
lots of content with wrong version indicators.
Those updating an existing Internet Media Type registration to
account for new versions are admonished to not make previously
conforming documents non-conforming. This is harder to enforce than
would seem, because the previous specifications are not always
accurate to what the Internet Media Type was used for in practice.
(NOTE: MULTIPLE INCOMPATIBLE AUTHORITATIVE SPECS)
4.5. Content Negotiation
The general idea of content negotiation is when party A communicates
to party B, and the message can be delivered in more than one format
(or version, or configuration), there can be some way of allowing
some negotiation, some way for A to communication to B the available
options, and for B to be able to accept or indicate preferences.
Content negotiation happens all over. When one fax machine twirps to
another when initially connecting, they are negotiating resolution,
compression methods and so forth. In Internet mail, which is a one-
way communication, the "negotiation" consists of the sender preparing
and sending multiple versions of the message, one in text/html, one
in text/plain, for example, in sender-preference order. The
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
recipient then chooses the first version it can understand.
HTTP added "Accept" and "Accept-language" to allow content
negotiation in HTTP GET, based on Internet Media Types, and there are
other methods explained in the HTTP spec.
4.6. Fragment identifiers
The Web added the notion of being able to address part of a content
and not the whole content by adding a 'fragment identifier' to the
URL that addressed the data. Of course, this originally made sense
for the original Web with just HTML, but how would it apply to other
content. The URL spec glibly noted that "the definition of the
fragment identifier meaning depends on the Internet Media Type", but
unfortunately, few of the Internet Media Type definitions included
this information, and practices diverged greatly.
If the interpretation of fragment identifiers depends on the MIME
type, though, this really crimps the style of using fragment
identifiers differently if content negotiation is wanted.
5. Recommendations
This section outlines the kinds of changes needed to bring the MIME
system in line with current practice and to address the problems
outlined above. The purpose of this text is not to specify the exact
details of how changes can be accomplished, but rather to find broad
aggreement.
We need a clear direction on how to make the Web more reliable, not
less. We need a realistic transition plan from the unreliable Web to
the more reliable one. Part of this is to encourage senders (Web
servers) to mean what they say, and encourage recipients (browsers)
to give preference to what the senders are sending.
We should try to create specifications for protocols and best
practices that will lead the Web to more reliable and secure
communication. To this end, we give an overall architectural
approach to use of MIME, and then specific specifications, for HTTP
clients and servers, Web Browsers in general, proxies and
intermediaries, which encourage behavior which, on the one hand,
continues to work with the already deployed infrastructure (of
servers, browsers, and intermediaries), but which advice, if
followed, also improves the operability, reliability and security of
the Web.
This section outlines requirements for standards and practices
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 11]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
intended to address some of the difficulties. This is an early
version, which mainly contains "strawman" proposals for changes. It
is intended to stimulate discussion -- however, the hope is that we
can get agreement about the nature of the problems and current
situation before focusing in detail about possible solutions.
However, having at least strawman proposals seems to be helpful. For
some problems, additional changes to IETF and W3C specifications are
also be advisable; the expectations are briefly outlined here.
5.1. Internet Media Type registration
Update the Internet Media Type registry and registration process.
5.1.1. MIME registry magic numbers for sniffing
Be clearer about relationship of 'magic numbers' to sniffing; review
Internet Media Types already registered and update.
5.1.2. Scripting and scriptable content safety
Be clearer about requiring Security Considerations to address risks
of sniffing
5.1.3. Fragment identifiers
Problem: MIME type definitions don't talk about fragment identifiers.
require definition of fragment identifier applicability; add fragID
semantics
5.1.4. Application info
Problem: ((hasn't been expanded)
Could the 'applications that use this type' section to be clearer
about whether the file type is frequently for embedding (plug-in) or
as a separate document with auto-launch (MIME handler), or should
always be downloaded? Is there a separate issue for 'auto-play on
download' vs. 'ask user for permission'?
5.1.5. File extensions in registry
Problem: Sniffing needs to use file extensions too; signify which
file extensions are useful for sniffing.
Be clearer about file extension use and relationship of file
extensions to MIME handlers
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 12]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
5.2. Sniffing
Various new specifications discuss, promote or mandate the use of
'sniffing' -- using the content of the data to supplement or even
override the declared content-type or charset. Update these
specifications.
5.2.1. Sniffing uses Media Type magic number
Update the proposed Media Type sniffing document so that sniffing
uses MIME registry for 'magic numbers'.
5.2.2. Sniffing when there are multiple different definitions
Address issue of sniffing when there are multiple independent
definitions of the same MIME type.
5.2.3. Sniffing charsets
Update sniffing of charsets to use charset reference info.
5.2.4. Sniffing security uses scriptability info
If the Internet Media Type registry is more explicit about which
kinds of content contain what kind of scriptability access, then the
specifications for sniffing can reference the Internet Media Type
registry to determine what kinds of sniffing constitute a 'privelege
upgrade'.
Note that all sniffing can be a priviledge upgrade, if there is a
buggy recipient, although bugs can be fixed, but spec violations are
a problem.
5.3. Changes to IANA processes for MIME registries
Problem: Internet Media Type registries are hard to update, and there
can be different definitions of the same MIME type.
STRAWMAN: Allow commenting or easier update; not all Internet Media
Type owners need or have all the information the internet needs.
Wiki for Internet Media Types as well as formal registry? Ability to
add comments about deployed senders, deployed content, deployed
recievers.
5.4. FTP specification
Do FTP clients also change rules about guessing file types based on
OS of FTP server?
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 13]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
5.5. Update some URI definitions
ftp, file, need sniffing, http sometimes does; data defaults to text/
plain rather than sniffing. Should this info be in the URI
definitions.
5.6. Changes to W3C findings, processes
Update Tag finding on authoritative metadata: is it possible to
remove 'authority'?
new: MIME and Internet Media Type section to WebArch, referencing
this memo
New: Add a W3C Web architecture material on MIME in HTML to W3C web
site, referencing this memo
Reconsider other extensibility mechanisms (namespaces, for example):
should they use MIME or something like it?
6. Acknowledgements
This document is the result of discussions among many individuals in
the IETF and W3C. Special thanks to Noah Mendelsohn.
7. IANA Considerations
This document includes no specific changes to IANA registries or
processes. However, it outlines several considerations for future
explicit recommendations to IANA, to change Internet Media Type and
Charset registries and the processes around their maintenance. IANA
evaluation of the feasibility of these changed processes is required.
8. Security Considerations
This document discusses some of the security issues resulting from
use (and mis-use) of MIME content types in the Web.
9. Informative References
[RFC1521] Borenstein, N. and N. Freed, "MIME (Multipurpose Internet
Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and
Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies",
RFC 1521, .
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 14]
Internet-Draft MIME and the Web October 2010
[RFC1522] Moore, K., "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
Part Two: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text",
RFC 1522, September 1993,
.
[RFC1945] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and H. Nielsen, "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0", RFC 1945, May 1996,
.
[RFC2046] Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types", RFC 2046,
November 1996, .
[RFC3117] Rose, M., "On the Design of Application Protocols",
RFC 3117, November 2001,
.
[WikiRobust]
"Robustness principle", 2010,
.
[connolly92]
Connolly, D., "Global Hypermedia", Oct 1992, .
[mime-sniff]
Barth, A. and I. Hickson, "Media Type Sniffing", May 2010,
.
Author's Address
Larry Masinter
Adobe
345 Park Ave.
San Jose, 95110
USA
Phone: +1 408 536 3024
Email: masinter@adobe.com
URI: http://larry.masinter.net
Masinter Expires April 28, 2011 [Page 15]