[Bug 6684] Disregard of RFC 4329 and IANA MIME Media Types

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=6684


Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|REOPENED                    |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX




--- Comment #8 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2009-04-01 18:06:49 ---
The "_cogent and strong_ reason" is "everyone uses text/javascript,
text/javascript works, and the other types are pointless".

Just because it's an RFC, or a W3C Recommendation, or any other kind of
specification, doesn't mean it's correct. Specifications get adopted or dropped
on their merits, and in this case the RFC in question simply doesn't match
reality. I have no interest in personally chasing up every such problem.

HTML5 has a far more cases of willful violations of other specs than just this
one -- e.g. we violate HTTP's requirement for honouring Content-Type, we
violate CharMod's requirement for honouring encoding names, we violate RFC3986
with respect to base URL handling in certain cases, we violate ECMAScript 3's
requirement with respect to the global object having to equal the global scope
'this' object, we violate 
RFC2046's requirement that text/* line breaks be CRLF only, we violate the
URI/IRI specs when it comes to parsing IRIs and when it comes to terminology.

In all these cases, the underlying specifications are just wrong, because they
ignored some aspect of reality and are thus not usable as written. This is why
specifications get maintained and updated. If you want to volunteer to update
4329, or any of those other specs, then please be my guest. In the meantime,
I'm not going to make the HTML5 spec refer to a type that nobody understands.
It is harmful pedantism.


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Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2009 18:06:58 UTC