Today I was working with trying to map MIME types to file extensions. You can probably guess that the meaning of file extensions overlaps. The MIME type system was an attempt to fix that by providing more specific information about the data format. Unfortunately we couldn’t get that right either.
Is it application/troff or application/x-troff? Is a TIFF file image/tiff or image/x-tiff? It matters because browser plugins are designed to handle certain MIME types. So basically what happens is you invent a browser plugin and a MIME type to go with it. If image/tiff is taken, use image/x-tiff. If that’s taken too, use image/ben-tiff. There are no rules saying you can’t.
This muddies the process of file format disambiguation quite a bit, which is what I’m dealing with today. Sometimes there is no clear answer to the problems in software and designing robust software means contending with the ambiguities that arise out of popular use.
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