RE: Proposed TAG Finding: Internet Media Type registration, consi stency of use

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tantek Çelik [mailto:tantek@cs.stanford.edu] 

> 
> > Second guessing behavior, while useful for entrenched companies to 
> > reenforce dependencies on implementation quirks, has 
> effects that are 
> > deleterious to the long-term health of the web.
> 
> This is nonsense.
> 
> There is nothing stopping web servers from fixing their 
> configuration files etc. to return proper mime types.
> 

I think the issue is that the web server DOES have a correct configuration
file and DOES correctly return a propert mime type - yet the browser does
not obey that response header. This is especially true when 'text/plain' is
used with data that
has content sort of similar to HTML (there are probably other more clear
examples).

Another point, if the user agent does not obey a specified content-type -
possibly displaying something as plain text even though angle brackets exist
in the content - how will authors know that their configuration files need
fixing? It will appear to be working fine and the configuration file will
remain broken.