part3: conformance: PD1.3.1 "should"

part 3 cd 1 section 7.2 says about the "mimetype" file:

<quote>
(PD1.3) It should contain a file "mimetype". This file shall meet the requirements:
(PD1.3.1) It should be the first file of the zip file.
</quote>

PD1.3 says that the mimetype file is not required.
presumably the motivation for this is that some documents that could be stored in a package may not have a MIME type.
i am not sure if i follow that argument. why can't you just use a MIME type like "application/octet-stream" in that case?
but fortunately part 1 conformance clauses make "mimetype" mandatory at least for ODF documents; that may be enough.

PD1.3.1 allows the mimetype file to not be the first file in the package.
but the motivation for the mimetype is that it should allow for easy recognition of the type of the document contained in the package,
and the only "easy" way is if this information is at a fixed offset from the beginning of the file, which is only possible for the first file.
(see the description in section 2.3 MIME Media Type, which relies on this)

so PD1.3.1 effectively makes the "mimetype" useless, and definitely should be changed.