Re: PROPOSAL: content sniffing [#155]

Julian Reschke wrote:
>
> First of all, we're only discussing Content-Type, *not* 
> Content-Encoding right?
>
> That being said, in the spirit of defining the meaning of the message, 
> not it's processing, how about:
>
> "When an entity-body is included with a message, the data type of that
> body is declared using the header fields Content-Type and 
> Content-Encoding."
>

to me that implies that Content-Encoding is always required, whereas in 
fact it's only required if there is an encoding also applied to the content.

I'd rather leave C-E out of it, or if referring to it, make it clear 
it's only required when there is an encoding.

Also it's not clear what "data type" means.  In the above text it 
implies some aggregation of "MIME" type plus encoding.  I think this 
could be confusing.  The concepts of type and encoding are discrete and 
I think should remain so.

What about something like:

"When an entity-body is included with a message, attributes of that 
entity-body are declared in Content-* headers.

Content-Length SHOULD be used to declare the length in bytes of the 
content where known and where Transfer-Encoding: chunked is not used.
Content-Type SHOULD be  used to declare the type of the content.
Content-Encoding MUST be used to declare any encoding where that may 
have been applied to the content.

..."

with references to relevant sections on those headers.

?

Regards

Adrien


> ?
>
> BR, Julian
>
>

-- 
Adrien de Croy - WinGate Proxy Server - http://www.wingate.com

Received on Thursday, 9 April 2009 00:01:47 UTC