[Zope-dev] Proposal: cleaning up the content-type story

[Tres Seaver]

Thomas Lotze wrote:
> Following up to Martijn's observations on the ZTK, I'd like to propose a
> clean-up of how we handle content types. There are several unrelated
> pieces of code concerned with content types, these include at least
> zope.contenttype, zope.mimetype and zope.publisher.contenttype.
> 
> - zope.contenttype does some content-type guessing from file names. It's
>   just a few lines of code and comes with a table of some 30 associations
>   of file-name extensions with content types.
> 
> - zope.mimetype is a more substantial package that deals with
>   content-type specific marker interfaces.
> 
> - zope.publisher.contenttype contains a parser for content-type
>   specifications.
> 
> I propose merging those two packages and one module into one package,
> zope.contenttype.
> 
> At present, zope.contenttype doesn't have any dependencies within the ZTK,
> and zope.mimetype depends on zope.configuration, zope.component and
> zope.interface. zope.publisher.contenttype doesn't import any zope code.
> 
> - Switching packages that depend on zope.mimetype would therefore add no
>   additional dependencies to them.
> 
> - There are three packages within the ZTK and the set of packages under
>   review which depend on zope.contenttype: zope.browserresource,
>   zope.app.file and zope.app.onlinehelp. All of them already depend on
>   zope.mimetype's dependencies, so there's nothing to be lost for them
>   either.
> 
> - Finally, the same holds for zope.publisher which would only acquire a
>   new dependency on zope.contenttype if zope.publisher.contenttype were to
>   be merged with the latter.
> 
> Further, the parser in zope.publisher.contenttype needs to be made more
> conformant with RfC 2045 and be used by other code that does some
> content-type matching of its own right now, such as zope.publisher.http.

+1 on consolidation.  A couple of questions:

- How do 'zope.file' and 'zope.filerepresentation' interact with these
   modules?

- How do these modules interact with the standard library's 'mimetypes'
   module?


Tres.
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
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