Re: Content Sniffing impact on HTTPbis - #155

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 12:28 PM, William A. Rowe, Jr.
<wrowe@rowe-clan.net> wrote:
> Adam Barth wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 7:10 AM, William A. Rowe, Jr.
>> <wrowe@rowe-clan.net> wrote:
>>> Server misrepresentation of Content-Type will cease, once browsers stop
>>> misrepresenting the content type.  Until web authors and administrators
>>> (including mass vhosters) become aware that they have misrepresented the
>>> data they are serving, they will continue to generate the 3% (IIRC) of
>>> mislabeled content.
>>
>> This is unlikely to ever occur given the market dynamics of browsers.
>
> Which is what makes the entire discussion so entirely laughable.
>
> I concur with Roy and Julian, leave Content-Type null with an undefined
> content type.  while user agents persist in nonsense (such as decoding
> UTF-7 when presented an explicit charset), this is out of our server-side
> and authors' hands, and no spec is going to correct their misbehavior or
> unsafe practices.
>
> For some tiny minority who care, the very absence of Content-Type conveys
> new, useful metadata that should not break 2616 definitions.

I don't share your pessimistic view, but that resolution is workable
from my perspective.

Thanks,
Adam