Re: Unknown text/* subtypes [i20]

Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
>> The reason we are making a change is that user agents indeed do *not* 
>> do what RFC2616 said. Thus we're removing that specific requirement. 
>> IMHO.
> 
> My point is that the issue with a MUST level requirement is that because 
> of what other specifications require (in the text/xml case, RFC3023) it 
> is still impossible to satisfy HTTP's requirements, therefore user 
> agents still do *not* (and will not) do what HTTP says. The four most 

I think RFC3023 is making the requirement *because* of the default in 
RFC2616. So it was RFC2616 overruling RFC2046, in turn being overruled 
by RFC3023.

> popular browsers aren't going to change their behaviour regarding this. 
> The only sensible thing to do, for the sake of interoperability, is to 
> match what they do, which we still don't do.

As Roy just stated, there are many other clients we need to consider in 
addition to the "four most popular browsers". What may seem to be the 
best behavior for them may be unacceptable to other user agents (and 
this includes many things that are not browsers at all).

What we need to discuss now is whether we want HTTP/1.1 to continue 
overruling RFC2046, whether we want to start overruling RFC3023 as well, 
and so on.

My preference clearly is to get out of that business, and let the MIME 
specs rule, in particular as those aforementioned browsers did not do 
what HTTP/1.1 says anyway.

So is there anything we *can* specify that matches reality?

BR, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2008 18:02:10 UTC