Re: Revisiting Authoritative Metadata

On 02/25/2013 09:37 AM, Robin Berjon wrote:
>> because I think it would be very
>> difficult for a user (or a user-agent) to determine (divine) whether
>> the sender meant this resource to appear as a text/plain document for
>> their purposes, or as HTML, unless the architecture had a way for a
>> sender to indicate its intentions.
>
> Again, I would like to see an example that doesn't involve the
> text/plain vs text/html distinction.

The reason that text/plain vs. text/html comes up so often is that it is 
a very clear description of one problem with sniffing - that the author 
intended the representation to be displayed as text without HTML 
interpretation. Displaying it as HTML doesn't only violate the wishes of 
the sender, but it likely ignores the user's wishes - how can the 
user-agent even know what is intended?

Although I agree that metadata sent from the server is less 
authoritative than one would hope, I do not agree that a user-agent can 
even accurately represent the wishes of the user in this case, let alone 
comply with them.

JohnK