[8604] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: File Types
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc VanHeyningen)
Fri Jul 14 19:58:58 1995
From: marcvh@spry.com (Marc VanHeyningen)
To: Paul Phillips <paulp@cerf.net>
Cc: Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com>,
Eric Hausgaard <eric@unix2.nysed.gov>,
Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www19.w3.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 14 Jul 1995 14:24:34 PDT."
<Pine.SUN.3.91.950714141721.2016A-100000@nic.cerf.net>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 16:53:18 -0700
Resent-From: www-talk@www10.w3.org
> On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
>
> > I think what you really want to do on the server side is make sure the
> > wordperfect files have a MIME type like
> >
> > application/x-wordperfect
> >
> > or something like that (anyone?)
>
> NCSA httpd's stock mime.types has application/wordperfect5.1, which I
> suppose is as much of a "standard" as anything.
It is a registered type name, yes.
> Makes it rather painful
> to support multiple versions, I'd think.
Apparently the company felt strongly they didn't want to do the obvious thing,
which is:
application/wordperfect; version=5.1
for some reason. I say the company's wishes should be ignored. :-)
> is illegal syntax, which doesn't infuse me with confidence that this is
> being addressed consistently. On another note: I know next to nothing about
> Wordperfect, but does it allow any kind of key binding? It's rather
> sketchy to download files from untrusted sources into applications not
> built with the concept of trust in mind.
WordPerfect allows macros (i.e. programs) to be included in documents, and
therefore has potential security risks. A proper security review was never
done when the type was registered; the Gopher folks said it could be done
later on. Needless to say, it never was.
