At 5/9/00 04:11 PM (Tuesday), Jim Starkey wrote:

>What is the advantage of a wholey subtype space? Since a filter
>is specific pair of subtypes, no semantic significant could apply
>to a range. I will concede that this is mostly a question of
>taste, but I prefer dense numbering schema.

I think there are two purposes for registering subtype numbers. First, is
for blob filters. I like Jim's comments about a dense numbering scheme and
base requirements for assigning a number.

The other purpose is for simple identification of a blob for client
applications. If there was a large, standardized taxonomy of blobs which
client applications could recognize then generalized utilities could be
built to deal with them separate and apart from blob filters. Here a more
organized numbering scheme such as what Bill suggested might help. On the
other hand, having any complete numbering scheme for know subtypes is
better than none and a translation table to provide more organization to a
simple sequentially assigned list would be easy.