HTTP actually does quite a good job of providing headers containing MIME type and encoding. There is a little work to get the default (e.g. HTML and XML are dif

HTTP actually does quite a good job of providing headers containing MIME type and encoding. There is a little work to get the default (e.g. HTML and XML are different), and decide on the case where the XML payload encoding is different to the HTTP transport encoding (e.g. perhaps XML parsers need a way to override the embedded header). So we end up at another plausible future-directed design decision: computer-computer communication should use HTTP. I think many systems have ended up there already, perhaps prompted by the issues we have discussed. Moral: good specs attract usage; bad, incomprehensible or inconsistently implemented specs fade away.