1. Introduction
Recent Internet protocols have been carefully designed to be easily extensible in certain areas. In particular, MIME [RFC 2045draft] is an open-ended framework and can accommodate additional object types, character sets, and access methods without any changes to the basic protocol. A registration process is needed, however, to ensure that the set of such values is developed in an orderly, well-specified, and public manner.
This document defines registration procedures which use the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) as a central registry for such values.
Historical Note: The registration process for media types was initially defined in the context of the asynchronous Internet mail environment. In this mail environment there is a need to limit the number of possible media types to increase the likelihood of interoperability when the capabilities of the remote mail system are not known. As media types are used in new environments, where the proliferation of media types is not a hindrance to interoperability, the original procedure was excessively restrictive and had to be generalized.