RE: Microsoft's "I mean it" content-type parameter

On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Justin James wrote:

> There are tons of legitimate use cases here they you have completely 
> overlooked. For example, lots of server side applications throw out content 
> of a type different from what their file extension would indicate. For 
> example, the earliest "hit counter" programs were .cgi or .pl files 
> (typically) generating image/gif or image/jpeg content. The Web servers were 
> set up explicitly to serve the output of those applications as text/html. 
> And a great many developers had no idea that they needed to change the 
> Content-type at the code level to make this work. Content sniffing made life 
> easier for these developers.

Uh, that doesn't make sense.

Sure, some scripts output wrong Content-Type. Then no browser can output it 
correctly and thus you fix the server side.

But, this system with bad Content-Type outputs still showing up nicely only 
works if the client *already* have does this "sniffing" business and thus they 
more or less encouraged the server-side hackers to remain sloppy.

So this cannot have been a case where the browser adapted to how servers work, 
since servers would hardly ever have worked this way if some browsers didn't 
already support it...

I find this "I promise this time I really mean that the type is what I say" 
attribute hilariously funny.

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se

Received on Thursday, 3 July 2008 15:52:49 UTC