Re: [XMLHttpRequest] update from the editor

* Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>If one UA treats Content-Type:text/foobar as XML and another UA does not  
>and a site starts relying on text/foobar being treated as XML we have a  
>problem.

We have very many problems of this nature right now. If I use XML 1.1 my
site won't work in Firefox, if I use CP850 as character encoding it will
not work in Opera, if I use Transfer-Encoding:gzip it will not work in
Internet Explorer, if I use XMLHttpRequest.responseBody it will not work
(I guess) in Safari.

All these are reasonable features to implement and use, and the draft
does not prohibit them in any way. So we are quite used to accept this
"risk". There is also a risk that by making the specification difficult
to understand and prohibiting reasonable implementation decisions, that
some browser vendors simply choose to ignore it. So I am afraid simply
the remote possibility of a "problem" is not a good enough reason.

I was unable, by the way, to get any browser but Opera to recognize the
type text/xsl as XML MIME type; Firefox from 1.5 to Minefield does not
seem to recognize it, and neither do IE6 and IE7 (on different versions
of Windows, and even a Linux box for Firefox); my test case works in all
these browsers if I simply use application/xml instead. Could you give
an example of a web page that works in IE and Firefox, yet depends on
them recognizing text/xsl as XML MIME type for XHR purposes?
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Thursday, 10 May 2007 15:21:39 UTC