Ian Hickson wrote: > I would strongly recommend that specs disallow sniffing of any kind, > treating all metadata as authorative (and giving explicit priorities to > handle metadata contradictions). I guess the issue is what do you consider metadata? I consider the fact that a file starts with the magic number for a gzip stream a very reliable piece of metadata (much more reliable than HTTP headers - oh and much more reliable than searching a document in an unknown encoding for 'html'). So, in my view you would have a metadata contradiction. > In certain rare cases where sniffing is > required due to missing metadata (as in the lack of byte order information > when no authorative default is stated), then the sniffing performed should > be well defined in order to allow all UAs to have exact interoperability. I would actually be _very_ happy to see the SVG spec define how this should be done, and in fact I think the portion of the spec originally quoted was doing this. The problem is that for some bizzare reason people don't seem to want to consider the file it's self a good source of metadata about what the file contains. For freeform text files I can understand this but gzip is a binary format it's structure is very rigid and if it is not a gzip stream you will find out quite quickly, not to mention it even includes a CRC of the uncompressed data, it is essentially beyond reason to consider a case where a gzip stream uncompresses successfully and it is not in fact a gzip stream. Now if what you are left with is an SVG document or not is a much tricker proposition.Received on Wednesday, 8 December 2004 21:13:36 UTC
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