RE: Why Microsoft's authoritative=true won't work and is a bad idea

Ian Hickson wrote:
> This is exactly why this won't work. Sites will use this correctly,
> then someone will set some default somewhere incorrectly, or copy and
> paste a correct site somehow, or misunderstand a tutorial or something,
> and deploy it without testing in IE8. And it will work fine in all the
> browsers except IE8, an then IE8 will be patched to make this attribute
> trigger a slightly different (and smaller) set of content-sniffing

No.

> The way out of this mess is containment. We define a strict set of
> Content-Type sniffing rules that are required to render the Web, and we
> get the browsers to converge on only sniffing for those.

Indeed.  And we're providing a way for content providers to opt out of that mess.

-Chris Wilson

Received on Tuesday, 8 July 2008 17:11:41 UTC