FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: MIME type definition -- explained by Lewis Carroll

["Daniel Reinhold" <danielr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, I believe Lewis Carroll best expressed this idea:

"You are sad," the Knight said in an anxious tone: "let me sing you a 
song to comfort you."

"Is it very long?" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry 
that day.

"It's long," said the Knight, "but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody 
that hears me sing it -- either it brings the 
tears into their eyes, or else --"

"Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

"Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called 
`Haddocks' Eyes.'"

"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel 
interested.

"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. 
"That's what the name is called. The name 
really is `The Aged Aged Man.'"

"Then I ought to have said `That's what the song is called'?" Alice 
corrected herself.

"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called `Ways 
and Means': but that's only what it's 
called, you know!"

"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time 
completely bewildered.

"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is `A-sitting 
On A Gate': and the tune's my own 
invention."


>> Hello,
>> 
>> while working on the implementation of the bin-utilities addattr and 
>> catattr (adds and dumps content of an attribute, respectively) I 
>> noticed 
>> something worth looking at.
>> 
>> As many of you know each attribute type is defined by a 32-bit 
>> constant. 
>> Those values are defined in /boot/develop/headers/be/support/
>> TypeConstants.h
>> When testing my versions of these utilites I noticed that while 
>> B_MIME_TYPE 
>> in this file is defined as 'MIME' (and therefore my utilities use 
>> that 
>> value) Be's original versions (and the rest of the OS, I'm afraid) 
>> define 
>> it as 'MIMS'.
>
>B_MIME_TYPE ('MIME') is not really a type. It just means that the 
>actual type is an MIME that can be found somewhere else. B_MIME_STRING 
>('MIMS') means that it data is not *of* an MIME type, it *is* an MIME 
>type. Thus, the BEOS:TYPE attribute is an 'MIMS'. You will notice that 
>both are defined.
>-Nathan