Re: PROPOSAL: content sniffing [#155]

On 09/04/2009, at 10:04 AM, Adrien de Croy wrote:

>
> 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.


It might be good to step back and look at the context:

> When an entity-body is included with a message, the data type of that
> body is determined via the header fields Content-Type and Content-
> Encoding. These define a two-layer, ordered encoding model:
>
>     entity-body := Content-Encoding( Content-Type( data ) )
>
> Content-Type specifies the media type of the underlying data.
> Content-Encoding may be used to indicate any additional content
> codings applied to the data, usually for the purpose of data
> compression, that are a property of the requested resource. There is
> no default encoding.



--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/