[vorbis-dev] Mime Type and Ogg (More)

[Ali Abdin]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Patrick Mauritz wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 04:58:47AM -0700, Pavel Cisler wrote:
> > P.S. The .tar.gz format was designed before mime types and mime magic
> > was widely used in modern desktop apps. You no longer have this as an
> > excuse :-)
> Yes, you have - after all, it's still in use and it's getting worse:
> .tar.bz2, .xcf.gz (gzipped gimp), .xcf.bz2 (bzip2-compressed gimp) etc.
> 
> I'd propose the following for mime-based applications:
>     transparent decompression of container-formats (.gz, .bz2)

Huh? so just to extract the mime-type we have to /unzip/ the file? 
Imagine a directory with hundreds of zip files (e.g. the man directory). 
 
> and for ogg: 
>     a textstream at the beginning containing information about
>     content in _human-readable_ form - binary flags are evil.
>     there is already "vorbis" at a specified place in every .ogg-file,
>     at this place all used codecs could be listed (and if you don't know
>     them, you can't play them)

"vorbis" as a mime-type string is "unreliable". To give an example: my 
.bash_history file is now detected as a audio/x-ogg file. 

The best "magic" strings would be ones that /include/ unreadable 
characters _AND_ a human readiable string (see pavel's example). That way 
text files with "vorbis" in them at byte 29 would not get detected as 
audio/x-ogg files (I just learned this yesterday from private email to 
pavel!)

> that would keep all the people quiet whining that their loved mime
> is not supported in their way

I think it is unfair to call us "whiners". We see a problem with Ogg 
Vorbis and are trying to resolve it with the developers on a public 
mailing list. Do you want us to just shut up and not work on adding Ogg 
Vorbis support?

Also - I believe mjs and pavel are providing sound technical reasons 
about this mime-type issue. They are not, as you say "whining".

> and for those who start this again with file-extension:
>   - standard is .ogg!
>   - you can use the extensions you want to use
>   - if your software doesn't understand that, extend file to understand ogg

File extension is not the issue here. I apologize for brining it up.

> p. mauritz, a flamewar-about-mime-and-fileextensions-hater 
> 
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