Re: Proposed Design Principles updated

On Apr 4, 2007, at 9:03 PM, olivier Thereaux wrote:

>
> Dave,
>
> On Apr 4, 2007, at 12:46 , David Hyatt wrote:
>> On Apr 3, 2007, at 7:19 PM, Elliott Sprehn wrote:
>>
>>> Neither of which are standardized behavior so you'd need to use  
>>> the attribute for Safari, the viewsource url for Firefox, and  
>>> what ever feature was supported in Opera (is it?).
>>>
>>> What Karl suggests on the other hand is defined behavior as per  
>>> the HTTP protocol and the MIME type definition for text/plain.
>>>
>>
>> We can't turn off content sniffing.  Sites break if we do.  "Don't  
>> break the existing Web" trumps all other design considerations.
>
> Isn't the case of CSS stylesheets served as text/plain a counter- 
> example of this?
>

I don't believe it is, unless WinIE has changed its behavior.  (I  
haven't tested IE7.)

> Some browsers started ignoring ill-served CSS, sites "broke"...  
> people eventually fixed their sites' config. The browsers' choice  
> to be strict, there, did not "break the web", arguably it helped  
> fix the web.
>

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Incorrect_MIME_Type_for_CSS_Files

It seems that this is enough of an issue that Mozilla still has a  
tech note posted about it.

> This is why "don't break the web" may be too ambiguous a principle,  
> when it can be interpreted as "don't try to fix anything that seems  
> deeply broken about current implementations".

I don't think there's anything ambiguous about the principle.

dave
(hyatt@apple.com)