PUBLIC MARKS with tag mimetype

One final approach that I find very interesting was mentioned by Jan Algermissen a while ago: If your format is based on an existing one, e.g. HTML or XML, your server can actually send the same content with different MIME types, depending on the client’s capabilities. A client that only included application/json in its Accept header would then get the content labeled application/json, while one that includes the specific MIME type application/vnd.whatever would get the same content with this label applied.

a whole CSS file, including the way you refer to the parts later on in the CSS.

MIME was invented originally for email, based on general principles of 'messaging', foundational architecture. The role of MIME was to extend Internet messaging from ASCII-only plain text (other character sets, images, rich documents, etc.) The basic architecture of complex content messaging is:

Via Stefan, a proposal from the WSO2 gang for an approach to decentralizing media types and removing the requirement for the registration process.

In a plain HTTP interaction, the Content-type and Accept headers carry information about the type of the data being transmitted and accepted, respectively. You’ve seen these media types in numerous examples, e.g. a typical request or response might have a Content-type header with the value application/xml.

A significant weakness of HTTP in my view is its dependence on the MIME standard for media type identification and on the related iana registry. This registry is a limited bottleneck that does not have the capacity to deal with the media type definition requirements of individual enterprises or domains. Machine-centric environments rely in a higher level of semantics than the human-centric environment of the Web. In order for machines to effectively exploit information, every unique schema of information needs to be standardised in a media type and for those media types to be individually identified. The number of media types grows as machines become more dominant in a distributed computing environment and as the number of distinct environments increases.