Re: image/, audio/, etc.?

Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>

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Subject: Re: image/*, audio/*, etc.? 
In-Reply-To: "Marc Andreessen"'s message of Thu, 07 Oct 93 04:28:05 PDT.
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Reply-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1993 11:31:13 -0500
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>

>>>>> Marca wrote:
> > > So... does anyone object to image/*, etc.?  (Precedent is in the
> > > mailcap RFC, btw.)
>On Oct 7, 10:17am, Nick Williams wrote:
> > version: i.e. the native usenix facesaver picture.  Mosaic doesn't
> > understand this, but carries on anyway.  Perhaps the link is slow as
The solution is simple.  If you don't really want image/* then don't
ask for it.  No one is going to force the users to do this.

> mind that I may have an external image 'viewer' that is perfectly capable of
> saving formats it doesn't understand to disk rather than just puking, so I as a
Exactly.

> > There.  Purely from the view of a server maintainer: I put in a lot of
> > working getting our server to do conversions automatically! :-)
So have I, I still think "type/*" is a must, otherwise browsers will have
to translate image/* in the .mailcap file into every format known to man
and beast, an intractable solution.

For example: here is a piece of my .mailcap:
    audio/basic; /usr/local/bin/play_au %s
    audio/au; /usr/local/bin/play_au %s
    audio/aiff; /usr/local/bin/play_aiff %s
    audio/x-aiff; /usr/local/bin/play_aiff %s
    audio/wav; /usr/local/bin/play_wav %s
    audio/x-wav; /usr/local/bin/play_wav %s
    audio/*; mosiac-internal-dump %s

The server should interpert this as I want one of the known formats first,
if not go ahead and send it and I'll save it to a file and I'll see what
I can do with it by hand.  I can convert other formats (voc, sbdsp, etc),
I just don't have players setup for them.

--sanders