MIME type for KIP Document

MIME types can be used for email attachments, web downloads and SIP content.

We use message/x.kip as the MIME type, because x. is for unregistered use and experiments. We hope to drop that part and later end with an officially registered MIME type message/kip. The present advise is to send the former and to accept both.

One interesting use for MIME types is in data: URIs. These start with a MIME type, and may have additional flags appended after a semicolon, until a comma prefixes the actual content in base64 encoding.

As options, we define analogs to the flags, such as ;private. We always need to add ;base64 because we are passing binary content in a textual URI.

Such URIs can be used to trigger a MIME-type-specific KIP handler that can validate signatures and possibly decrypt concealed links before relaying the link to another application. This makes it a secure reference, and the security status may well be acknowledged by the tools.

Note that a URL can also be formatted as a QR-code. In this case, the same quality assurances may be made available to mobile devices.