Re: Why Microsoft's authoritative=true won't work and is a bad idea

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Dave Singer wrote:
>> Next up:  a server that always adds the "I mean it" attribute, even when 
>> it doesn't, and the subsequent invention of the "No, really, come on, 
>> you have to believe me, scout's honor, I really truly mean it" 
>> extension.
> 
> This is exactly why this won't work. Sites will use this correctly, then 
> someone will set some default somewhere incorrectly, or copy and paste a 
> correct site somehow, or misunderstand a tutorial or something, and deploy 
> it without testing in IE8. And it will work fine in all the browsers 
 > ...

Well, only if the other UAs do not adopt the proposal.

I'm not saying they should (yet), but why wouldn't it work if all UAs 
did the same thing here?

> except IE8, an then IE8 will be patched to make this attribute trigger a 
> slightly different (and smaller) set of content-sniffing instead... except 
> that the set won't be quite what was intended, because there will be some 
> bug, and then there will be sites that DO test with this patched IE8, but 
> end up relying on this slightly different content sniffing...
> 
> ...and ten years from now we'll have four different content sniffing modes 
> with four different ways of triggering it and the next generation will 
> look back at 2008 and wonder what we were thinking.
> 
> 
> The way out of this mess is containment. We define a strict set of 
> Content-Type sniffing rules that are required to render the Web, and we 
> get the browsers to converge on only sniffing for those.
> ...

So you can get the browser vendors to converge on a precise set of 
sniffing rules, but you can't get them to agree on an opt-out?

Sounds inconsistent to me.

BR, Julian

Received on Saturday, 5 July 2008 07:40:43 UTC