Is there already a definition of a mimetype for bicep files?

[samtrion]

I am currently facing the problem that I need to store a mimetype for the .bicep files. Is there already a definition for this?

If not, would one of the following examples be acceptable? e.g. application/bicep or application/x-bicep.

[brwilkinson]

Hi @samtrion

I personally don't have any depth of understanding on mime types; However after doing some research on this, I have a few questions/comments. I can do some follow up on this request.

What is your use case for this? Assuming this is for a linux evironment?

It seems the bicep files are just defaulted to text/plain

file --mime-type -b ./bicep/00-ALL-MG.bicep
text/plain

That seems reasonable for a file association; I guess you may want something more specific for how to handle bicep files? Maybe what editor it would open up with? Or some kind of scanning?

referencing these docs
https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml

In particular this doc: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/MIME_types#types

It seems like application is supposed to be for binary files?

application
Any kind of binary data that doesn't fall explicitly into one of the other types

So text seems appropriate?

text
Text-only data including any human-readable content, source code, or textual data such as comma-separated value (CSV) formatted data. Examples include: text/plain, text/csv, and text/html

The confusing part is that we have application/json which is not actually binary?!
https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/json

It seems there is a link to these text options and they are registered with iana:

I see in our docs that it does recommend registering new mime types.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/legacy/cc144156(v=vs.85)#register-new-file-types-in-the-iana-mime-database

In which case we would register a new discrete, text subtype.

type/subtype
text/subtype

The other main factor is what is mentioned here:

Warning: Browsers use the MIME type, not the file extension, to determine how to process a URL, so it's important that web servers send the correct MIME type in the response's Content-Type header. If this is not correctly configured, browsers are likely to misinterpret the contents of files, sites will not work correctly, and downloaded files may be mishandled.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Type

So I believe this will default to text/plain; charset=us-ascii

• In order for me to do some follow up, I am interested what/why registering a new subtype is useful for you? Or how you wanted to use it?

[samtrion]

Thank you for your very detailed reply. My inquiry arose out of the PR alecthomas/chroma#564.

I also knew so far only the statement from the Microsoft Page and am equally confused. Actually there are separate IANA registrations for many files from programming & markup languages. Not only application/json, but also application/xml, text/markdown etc.

Hence my question, because it's just not really consistent either. I will correct the PR alecthomas/chroma#564 according to your statement to text/plain for now and then we'll see. Thank you.

[brwilkinson]

Okay I'll mark this as answered for now, since you got what you needed for that PR. If you have any follow ups let us know.