- From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:50:36 +1000
- To: Dave Singer <singer@apple.com>
- Cc: Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com>, robert@ocallahan.org, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Adam Barth <w3c@adambarth.com>, Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>, "ietf-http-wg@w3.org" <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>, public-html@w3.org
Speaking personally -- that's all fine and good and understandable, but why can't I as a user turn it off, either as a preference or on a case-by-case basis? Sometimes "going the extra mile" gets it wrong, and as with any heuristic, there needs to be a way to say "no, don't do that!" E.g., how hard is it to have an unintrusive non-modal indication that the type was sniffed, giving the user the option to view it without sniffing (as FF does when it asks you if you want to remember a password)? This isn't perfect (e.g., because there can still be unwanted side effects of loading the document with the incorrect media type), but it's a good step in the right direction... I know that implementing that take developer time, but how much developer time has been sunk on these discussions already? ;) Cheers, On 17/06/2009, at 2:42 PM, Dave Singer wrote: > I suspect that the problem is partly economic. Faces with bug > reports etc. saying "it doesn't work right" we can either explain > endlessly what people have got wrong...or we can sharply reduce the > number of such calls (which cost money) by sniffing. > > Don't get me wrong, I don't like sniffing. But I don't think a > stroke of Ian's pen will make it go away. > > (It's also odd to have a spec. which bars the user agent from 'going > the extra mile'. Specs classically say all the things you must do to > be conformant, and generally can't stop you from doing more.) > > > At 23:31 -0500 6/16/09, Shane McCarron wrote: >> This is my favorite comment in this thread, bar none! Why, oh why >> are you all trying so hard to continue to support broken behavior >> instead of slapping down the people who insist on doing it wrong? >> If the user agents (go Firefox!) just refused to sniff, then no one >> would send nonsense content. 'cause it wouldn't work. >> Robert O'Callahan wrote: >>> I should also point out that so far we have had approximately zero >>> complaints from authors about the fact that Firefox doesn't sniff. >>> >>> Rob > > -- > Dave Singer > Apple Computer/QuickTime 408 974 3162 > -- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
Received on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 12:51:14 UTC