Re: Public beta test of the W3C Markup Validator

[snip]
> >>MS IE 6 sends an incorrect, sniffed MIME type of text/xml when
> >>uploading the same file presumably because it sees the xml declaration.
> >>I have not tried the exhaustive tests (removal of xml declaration,
> >>inclusion of the string '<html' or ',HTML' in the first 256 bytes,
> >>perhaps inside a comment) etc to try and describe the sniffing
> >>algorithm correctly.
>
> And this is precisely why sniffing and guessing should be avoided at all
> costs. There is also the issue that as long as browsers accept sloppy
> markup etc. there will never be an incentive for authors to clean up their
> act. This may be debatable for the case of browsers, but for the
Validator,
> it's its _job_ to be strict abiout these things! The Validator isn't there
> to give people a fuzzy good feeling; it's there to help people make
> absolutely sure their documents satisfy the most basic level of quality.
>


The MSIE problem is more complicated than guessing will cover.  I'm running
MSIE 6.  I took
an XML document and produced XHTML with two encodings (utf-8 and utf-16).
MSIE6 had no
problem displaying either one.  However, the validator chose a MIME type of
application/octet-stream for the utf-16 version, which BTW the validator
does not support.  The utf-8 document validated with no errors.

In addition, Amaya changed the MIME type as application/xhtml+xml evidently
ignoring the meta tag and would not display the utf-16 document at all,
except for the BOM.  Opera had no problem
with either document.