Re: Draft TAG finding available: Client handling of MIME headers

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>> Let's assume that an HTTP user agent uses PUT to send an entitity body 
>> to an
>> HTTP server, but neglects to provide a content-type header. What's the
>> recommend server behaviour for subsequent GET requests to that resource?
>>
>> 1) do not send a content type header (server refuses to guess),
>>
>> 2a) guess content type based on "extension" (hmph...) or
...
>> Note that 2a) is what currently Apache/moddav does, and this really 
>> seems to
>> be a very bad idea.
> 
> It is what the owner of that URI-space has configured the server to do.

Yes, it's ugly, but if the provider of the representation doesn't 
provide a media-type, what choice do you have but guessing?  In fact, 
Apache by default guesses media-type for static files that it serves on 
exactly the same basis (I bet IIS does too), and that seems to work OK.
-- 
Cheers, Tim Bray
         (ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)