Re: mode= and type= not orthogonal

[Graham <dtcd@xxxxxxx>]

On 19 Dec 2003, at 11:28 pm, Tim Bray wrote:

> So.... either we say mode="escaped" implies type="text/html".

But surely it's the other way around since:

<content type="text/html" mode="xml"><img src="..."></content>

is not well formed. It follows then that the only way to transfer 
non-XML textual data is escaped as a string:

<content type="text/html" mode="escaped">&lt;img src="..."&gt;</content>

We could drop the mode attr entirely and say:
1) XML types imply mode="xml"
2) Non-XML textual types => mode="escaped"
3) Binary types => base64

Obviously we can't really, since it's valid to treat XML as text and 
text as binary. But Tim has a point, the current design needs looking 
at.

Thought exercise:
How would one syndicate PostScript? It looks like this:

%!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0
%%BoundingBox:0 0 288 288
%%ColorUsage: Color
%%DocumentProcessColors: Cyan Magenta Yellow Black
/ok_Ellipse
{
        ok_xOffset ok_yOffset moveto
        ok_x1 0 ok_xR ok_y1 ok_xR ok_yR rcurveto
        0 ok_y1 ok_x1 neg ok_yR ok_xR neg ok_yR rcurveto
        ok_x1 neg 0 ok_xR neg ok_y1 neg ok_xR neg ok_yR neg rcurveto
        0 ok_y1 neg ok_x1 ok_yR neg ok_xR ok_yR neg rcurveto
        closepath
} def

Graham