What about formats which don’t have MIME types yet? Tim Berners-Lee has long lamented that he used mime types instead of just URIs (because MIME types aren’t available for all formats, take a while to get, and needlessly create another central authority). Why should we make the same mistake?
Actually, with the vendor specific registration now available, there really isn’t any excuse for not having a mime-type.
— joe 
There are reserved mime-types you can use while you wait. I see no reason why it would be hard to tell product vendors to support x-temporary mime-type and support x-official mime-type for once the mime-type has been registered.
— Lach
Suspiciously missing is the “why,” which, in this case, is to educate readers on the Ws of Weblogging.
— Wade
Are mime types essential? Why?
Yeah, I know, they’re important technically, but essential to a blogpost?
Nope.
Not in the same way dates and permalinks are.
APIs - the ‘how’ of weblogging?
Personally, I would leave the ‘why’ up to the author - that’s their perogative ;)
— Alex
MIME types are essential. Weblogging is on the web, and of the web. The web works on MIME types (like it or not). In print media we only have two media types (not including those stupid scratch-and-sniff inserts): text and images, and we rely on the end human reader to distinguish between them. On the web we have a potentially infinite variety of media types and markup languages, and computers are stupid, so we use MIME types to help them distinguish.
— Mark
I’ll take the risk of playing the fool… but is there a resource I can view to find out about how to use MIME types, including syntax? Most discussions I see about them assume knowledge on the part of the reader, which I don’t have. But I’m willing to learn.
— Dave S,
Admittedly fodder, for whatever enjoyment you may get from it:
Why is it so fashionable, now, to concern ourselves with mimes when we’ve spent so much time with their derision?
— Muraii
I’m with Martin Wisse — I don’t see how you can put MIME types into this “set of requirements”. Your first few points are good usability suggestions; your last is an *extremely* technical suggestion, not relevant (sorry) to the general public.
Users don’t care, or need to care, about MIME type. They just want to point and click; to see, hear and read. The page doesn’t have to declare a MIME type to do that.
And bloggers don’t need to know how to declare MIME type, or what MIME type even is, in order to add images, video, audio, flash movies and/or whatever else they like to their posts.
(Similarly, bloggers don’t need to know how to include .GEO metadata information — which is the *geographical* indication of “where”.)
None of the things I listed are generated by the end user. Permalinks are generated automatically; dates default automatically (although some CMSs let the user change them); author information is entered once and then re-displayed/generated on demand, on every post; MIME types are handled by the CMS or underlying web server. What do end users have to do with it? We’re not talking about end users.
— Mark
Good points in this post. I still have not mastered the used of MIME types, but will be looking at that next, to see what I can do to make things tight. I want to give users access to a variety of different video/audio formats, and I hate when things don’t work properly due to (what I am assuming) are unspecified MIME types. Anyways, should be interesting to learn.
Good points in this post. I still have not mastered the use of MIME types, but will be looking at that next, to see what I can do to make things tight. I want to give users access to a variety of different video/audio formats, and I hate when things don’t work properly due to (what I am assuming) are unspecified MIME types. Anyways, should be interesting to learn.
I think what Michael is trying to say that most users will still play with settings like date, and permalinks (what is used as a peramlink for example) etc etc. The vast majority of users however don’t even know what a mime time is let alone how to use it.
I saw a mime on the street the other day. It appeared as if he was trapped inside an invisible box and couldn’t get out! How absurd, I thought, and then I started to realize how much the internet has turned into an invisible box that I can’t seem to get out of… stupid mime.
— MikeyC
Confucious Say: “Mime type on invisible keyboard”.
— P-man
Still disagree about mime types.
Permalinks, dates and author are all visible, functional parts of a weblog entry. A mime type isn’t. It’s a technical requirement.
There are 3 items, and only 3 items, that constitute a web log.
1 - Author
2 - Date
3 - Chronology (implies date)
You can’t have a chronology without dates, so item 2 and 3 go together. It stands to reason that you need a human author. I think allowing an automated program to be regarded as an author is not in the spirit.
There certainly does not have to be Permalinks and it certainly does not have to be in *reverse* chronology. Permalink is a nice-to-have feature. It makes referencing easy. But if I read “a log” and it wasn’t in reverse chron and didn’t have permalinks could I not call it a web log? If not — I would be denying the fact that I am staring at a chronological listing of human-written entries, otherwise known as a, (gulp) — log!
— Steven
What about comments? Aren’t they essential, too?
And what about RSS feeds?
— JJ
I think your mom is essential to a proper post…
sorry, it’s 5 in the morning and I couldn’t resist. Anyway.. forgotten. Why and how. I think both of these should concern being clear in your posts. Why: why you should go to a link. Why you are posting.. etc, How: Is it flash? do I need a plugin/program? How will this affect me? just a thought..
— Fidel