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I am a bit confused by the nesting that occurs in Media types (also known as their former name 'MIME types'):

The top level types are called application, text, image video, audio, message, model and a couple of others. However, it is not clear to me why certain subtypes are nested under one of these, while other subtypes are nested under a different one:

  • Datastructures: Why application/json but text/csv? And why does xml appear both as application/xml and text/xml? And why are these not in message/* or model/*, which at least on a surface level seem to fit 'encoded datastructure' better?
  • Languages: Why application/javascript but text/html and text/css?
  • Why is there both application/xml and text/xml?

In an effort to make this a clear, objective question, maybe the question might be best phrased as: What are the rules that determine in which type a 'Media-type'-subtype will be placed, and why are there some 'duplicates'?

Qqwy
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    See [RFC 2046](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046) for the definition of top-level media types: “text” is for human-readable formats, “application” for formats that are supposed to be processed by some application. Human-readable data interchange formats like XML or JSON can be seen as either. – amon Nov 04 '18 at 12:05

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