Microsoft’s MIME types



  • So I am working on a project that involves documenting some MIME types, and I stumbled upon the types that Microsoft registered with IANA for their OOXML formats.

    An OOXML document has the mind-numbingly long type of application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document. For comparison, the MIME type for a regular Word document is application/msword. Even the normally slightly excessive vnd.oasis.opendocument.text seems downright spartan and well-restrained in comparison. And this isn’t even the longest registered type—that honour goes to application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document.glossary+xml. Why does a glossary that is part of another document need its own MIME type? I don’t know, but apparently in Microsoft-land it does!

    At first, I had to do a double-take to make sure that somebody hadn’t forgotten to add a comma, and that actually this was actually a single type. I simply don’t understand what goes through the mind of a Microsoft engineer that could possibly get them to come up with ideas like this.



  • I think every type of XML file in a docx archive gets its own MIME type; so the document XML itself gets [font=monospace]application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document.main+xml[/font] and the styles XML has [font=monospace]application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.styles+xml[/font].  So the vendor is "Open XML Formats - Office Document", and ... wait a minute...

     Meanwhile, IE still doesn't recognise "application/javascript".

     

     



  • Badly disguised rant

    At least the file has a real registered mime type. They have yet to register a mime type for WAVE files. But strangely enough, they bothered for icon files...



  • @henke37 said:

    At least the file has a real registered mime type. They have yet to register a mime type for WAVE files. But strangely enough, they bothered for icon files...

    .WAV files are not often used on the web, however favicon.ico is a widespread use of .ICO files on the web.



  • @Watson said:

     Meanwhile, IE still doesn't recognise "application/javascript".

    It still prompts to download if you serve XHTML as [code]application/xhtml+xml[/code].



  • @henke37 said:

    At least the file has a real registered mime type. They have yet to register a mime type for WAVE files. But strangely enough, they bothered for icon files...
    Well, they’ve done better than Adobe in that regard, who are still using an unregistered experimental MIME type for Flash. At least Microsoft filed an RFC: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2361.

    I’m slightly tempted to register audio/vnd.wave on their behalf now just to see what happens.



  • Actually, aren't WAV files a subset of RIFF files?



  • You should never ever be using WAVE files online anyway. Use FLAC for lossless encoding, OGG for lossy encoding, zip or 7z if you need them in .wav format and won't likely have a decoder installed.



  • Wave is like the BMP of audio.


    (although that's not entirely true.)



  • I can store mp3 data in a WAVE file damn it! It's just that noone is using a modern codec with the file format these days. I mean, have you looked at the WAVE codec list? It is a bad joke!



  • @henke37 said:

    I can store mp3 data in a WAVE file damn it! It's just that noone is using a modern codec with the file format these days.

    Probably because Vista's/7's audio recorder won't do that any more, and there is no other piece of software than pre-Vista audio recorder that actually did that.



  • @benryves said:

    @Watson said:

     Meanwhile, IE still doesn't recognise "application/javascript".

    It still prompts to download if you serve XHTML as <FONT size=2 face="Lucida Console">application/xhtml+xml</FONT>.

     

    that's a deliberate design decision; they aren't going to pretend to parse XHTML properly until they can, in fact, parse it properly

     http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/15/467901.aspx



  • @frymaster said:

    @benryves said:

    @Watson said:

     Meanwhile, IE still doesn't recognise "application/javascript".

    It still prompts to download if you serve XHTML as <FONT size="2" face="Lucida Console">application/xhtml+xml</FONT>.

     

    that's a deliberate design decision; they aren't going to pretend to parse XHTML properly until they can, in fact, parse it properly

     http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/15/467901.aspx

    And they still can't parse it properly. Despite it being simple XML.



  • @lolwtf said:

    You should never ever be using WAVE files online anyway. Use FLAC for lossless encoding, OGG for lossy encoding, zip or 7z if you need them in .wav format and won't likely have a decoder installed.

    BWAHAHAHAHA!



  • CDeX can do WAVE files with MP3 encoding just fine. And it's a nice trick to save hd space when dealing with programs so old that they have sound in WAVE files and are letting the OS play them back.
    Also, ogg is a container file format, it does not decide the codec used.



  • @dhromed said:

    Wave is like the BMP of audio.


    (although that's not entirely true.)

     

    *cough, splutter*

    Wavs if used in an online context, and I don't mean DJ mixes on Soundcloud but those shitty little sound clips in some crappy subpar bitrate making them sound like you're underwater - are the BMP of audio.  Although actually I'd award that to Sun .au for being the least used unless you are Damon Hart-Davis (great photo gallery, wtf is it with those weird audio files).

    Low bitrate wavs online are the clip art of audio.

    But I don't think you could call my 32 bit mixes the BMP of audio. Electronic musicians work in 24 or 32 bit wav format on Windows or Linux and aifs or the occasional render to wav on Mac. Contrary to what the Apple fanboys would have you believe, there are a fairly equal number of us using Windows.

     



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @lolwtf said:

    You should never ever be using WAVE files online anyway. Use FLAC for lossless encoding, OGG for lossy encoding, zip or 7z if you need them in .wav format and won't likely have a decoder installed.

    BWAHAHAHAHA!

     

    +1 rolling on the floor

    @lolwtf please learn something about audio online thesedays and go visit soundcloud.com. No self respecting musician zips their audio files (in case they corrupt) and if you want to have an audience of 0 go ahead and use ogg. Same with FLAC, nice idea, no uptake excepting the occasional Linux nerd. You want the music, you suck up the bandwidth. You talk like we're on 56k modems.

    The standard for mp3s is 320kb/s by the way, if you're distributing music online. But a lot of DJs will distribute as 24 bit wav, or use soundcloud if you live somewhere like Australia and want to offer people a preview without the large download cost.



  • @Nyquist said:

    But I don't think you could call my 32 bit mixes the BMP of audio.
    Considering they’re both old, fully uncompressed* data formats, which I do believe was the whole point of the fucking comparison, yes, I do think you could.

    @Nyquist said:

    @lolwtf please learn something about audio online thesedays and go visit soundcloud.com.
    Please learn something about audio technology in general and visit hydrogenaudio.org.

    @Nyquist said:

    No self respecting musician zips their audio files (in case they corrupt) and if you want to have an audience of 0 go ahead and use ogg.
    Yes, far better to drop corrupt frames without notice than to use a checksummed file format so you know your data was received intact. How silly!!

    @Nyquist said:

    Same with FLAC, nice idea, no uptake excepting the occasional Linux nerd.
    You clearly have never looked at what lossless audio compression formats are actually used in the wild on the Internet. I’ll give you a hint: FLAC is #1.

    @Nyquist said:

    The standard for mp3s is 320kb/s by the way, if you're distributing music online.
    Whose standard? If you are going to encode anything in MP3, for fuck’s sake, use VBR.

    * Nobody uses RLE bitmaps. Shut up.

    [Edit: double post because community server is a piece of shit]



  • @snover said:

    You clearly have never looked at what lossless audio formats are actually used in the wild on the Internet. I’ll give you a big hint: FLAC is #1.
    It finally overtook Shorten?



  •  

    @Nyquist said:

    No self respecting musician zips their audio files (in case they corrupt)
     

    ZIP files don't corrupt your files. Don't make up things.

    @Nyquist said:

    if you want to have an audience of 0 go ahead and use ogg

    @Nyquist said:

    Same with FLAC, nice idea, no uptake excepting the occasional Linux nerd.

    @Nyquist said:

    The standard for mp3s is 320kb/s by the way, if you're distributing music online.

    It's likely that you suffer from reference frame error.

    Everybody else is happily using ogg and flac and non-320kbps mp3 to listen to their tunes.

    @ender said:

    It finally overtook Shorten?

    I only know about Shorten because I stumbled upon its wikipedia page. I'm not sure if my experience is statistically significant, but FLAC appears to the audio's PNG in terms of general popularity.

     



  • @Nyquist said:

    But I don't think you could call my 32 bit mixes the BMP of audio.
     

    It's big and uncompressed format, so I think I can.



  • @snover said:

    hydrogenaudio.org.

    Happen to be a member there?



  • @snover said:

    @Nyquist said:

    But I don't think you could call my 32 bit mixes the BMP of audio.
    Considering they’re both old, fully uncompressed* data formats, which I do believe was the whole point of the fucking comparison, yes, I do think you could.


    * Nobody uses RLE bitmaps. Shut up.

     

    I actually looked into RLE the other day. Apparently in the BMP file format, you can only RLE-compress [i]8-bit[/i] images. The format doesn't support RLE compression on 16 or 24-bit images.



  • Hey! Get back to pointless bickering about audio formats! I was really getting into that.

    Here: Apple Lossless is the best. Work with that.



  • @Nyquist said:

    @lolwtf please learn something about audio online thesedays and go visit soundcloud.com. No self respecting musician zips their audio files (in case they corrupt)

    If he'll learn to be as superstitious and ignorant as that, he's better off staying the hell away.  Not zipping things in case they corrupt?  Sounds like the kind of half-understood mangled concept some idiot muso would come up with if they thought that the sampled bits of their music were likely to be subject to line noise as they travel around the internet.

    Say, you're not a drummer by any chance are you?



  • @DaveK said:

    If he'll learn to be as superstitious and ignorant as that, he's better off staying the hell away.  Not zipping things in case they corrupt?  Sounds like the kind of half-understood mangled concept some idiot muso would come up with if they thought that the sampled bits of their music were likely to be subject to line noise as they travel around the internet.
    And for them, there is the $499 Ultra Premium Denon Link Cable.



  • @snover said:

    @DaveK said:
    If he'll learn to be as superstitious and ignorant as that, he's better off staying the hell away.  Not zipping things in case they corrupt?  Sounds like the kind of half-understood mangled concept some idiot muso would come up with if they thought that the sampled bits of their music were likely to be subject to line noise as they travel around the internet.
    And for them, there is the $499 Ultra Premium Denon Link Cable.
    Not good enough.  I need a cable where every bit is individually wrapped in cloth of gold and delivered to the audio processor by a tiny gnome who treats it with the care and reverence it deserves.



  • @Thief^ said:

    @snover said:

    @Nyquist said:

    But I don't think you could call my 32 bit mixes the BMP of audio.
    Considering they’re both old, fully uncompressed* data formats, which I do believe was the whole point of the fucking comparison, yes, I do think you could.


    * Nobody uses RLE bitmaps. Shut up.

     

    I actually looked into RLE the other day. Apparently in the BMP file format, you can only RLE-compress 8-bit images. The format doesn't support RLE compression on 16 or 24-bit images.

    BMPs can also contain [url=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd183376(VS.85).aspx]JPEG and PNG data[/url] — just as WAV files can hold MP3, or even OggVorbis audio.



  • @snover said:

    $499 Ultra Premium Denon Link Cable.
    Wait a minute.  Am I the last one in the world to realize that they're using ethernet cables for audio?  What's wrong with good old fashioned speaker wire?  except for the fact that it's less than $100 a foot.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @belgariontheking said:

    @snover said:
    $499 Ultra Premium Denon Link Cable.
    Wait a minute.  Am I the last one in the world to realize that they're using ethernet cables for audio?
    Probably not the last, no.....


  • BINNED

    @belgariontheking said:

    @snover said:

    $499 Ultra Premium Denon Link Cable.
    Wait a minute.  Am I the last one in the world to realize that they're using ethernet cables for audio?  What's wrong with good old fashioned speaker wire?  except for the fact that it's less than $100 a foot.


    I'm dumbstruck. Don't they have ANY clue what digital means? Even if it were a cable for analog audio there's no way it could be worth $500.

    Ripping off idiots sure seems like a job that pays off these days.



  • @topspin said:

    I'm dumbstruck. Don't they have ANY clue what digital means? Even if it were a cable for analog audio there's no way it could be worth $500.
    Of course, why pay $500 when you can pay £7,500?



  • @topspin said:

    Don't they have ANY clue what digital means?

    Do you?  Just because it's digital, that doesn't mean it isn't "best-effort delivery".  Not all digital formats use error-correction.  It doesn't apply in this case (or in most cases), but "digital" does not mean "incapable of signal degradation".  Look at audio CDs.


  • BINNED

    That certainly is stupid nitpicking considering what I was saying. Would you also approve of a (hypothetical) $1000 super special laser diode for higher performace CD playback?

    Yes, I know what it means: If you put the slightest effort into it you get lossless quality. Ethernet frames certainly have checksums. CDs do have error correction too btw, but of course with too many scratches you're fucked.



  • @topspin said:

    That certainly is stupid nitpicking considering what I was saying.
     

    You're saying tech forums exist for something other than stupid nitpicking?

     

    @topspin said:

    Would you also approve of a (hypothetical) $1000 super special laser diode for higher performace CD playback?

    If I'm selling and people are buying, absolutely.

     

    @topspin said:

    Ethernet frames certainly have checksums.

    Hence my comment that it doesn't apply in this case.


  • BINNED

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @topspin said:
    Would you also approve of a (hypothetical) $1000 super special laser diode for higher performace CD playback?

    If I'm selling and people are buying, absolutely.

     

    That was my original point. Ripping off idiots pays.


  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Not all digital formats use error-correction.

    I have experienced this myself. I had to move my workstation to a part of the office with high RF noise and when I turned it on I discovered that my monitor did not display the picture any more. It was connected with a DVI cable, swapped it for a VGA cable and it worked. Of course with the VGA cable the noise was also visible.

    The noise was not just RF but also audible (server room), if they'd not have moved me back I would have quit the job.



  • I didn't realise that dvi didn't have error correction. Looking through the specs, it encodes 8 bits as 10, not for error correction but for DC balance. Interference is supposed to be taken care of enough by the cable being twisted pair, shielded if necessary.







  •  You guys make my day.

    if you do not follow the "directional markings" on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that.

    omething came through these cables, something from somewhere else. We were overrun in days, not many of us are left.



  •  But the arrows point in both directions.



  • @ender said:

    @topspin said:
    I'm dumbstruck. Don't they have ANY clue what digital means? Even if it were a cable for analog audio there's no way it could be worth $500.
    Of course, why pay $500 when you can pay £7,500?
     

     Don't forgotthe dual is £12,950  - BUT there is free day burn in!!!!

    <font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">
    </font></font>

     



  • @dhromed said:

     You guys make my day.

    if you do not follow the "directional markings" on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that.

    omething came through these cables, something from somewhere else. We were overrun in days, not many of us are left.

    That last quote notwithstanding, it still gets four stars for dimensional rift preventability.


  • @topspin said:

    Would you also approve of a (hypothetical) $1000 super special laser diode for higher performace CD playback?

    You think you're on-topic, but you're not. The Red Book audio standard focuses on speed of reading, not accuracy. (Why else do EAC and cdparanoia exist?) Sure, $1000 was intentionally over-the-top, but I - and I'm sure, many others - would gladly pay several times the going rate of a “normal” optical drive for a drive that has intensive built-in error-checking and sector verification.

    @ender said:

    It finally overtook Shorten?

    Shorten's problem is that it only does CD-quality audio - FLAC does 96KHz/24-bit and better.

       --- Mr. DOS



  • @Mr. DOS said:

    Shorten's problem is that it only does CD-quality audio - FLAC does 96KHz/24-bit and better.
    Shorten has many more problems than that. Seeking is a hack, it has horrible compression ratios compared to newer codecs, no error handling, no tagging, blah blah.


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