Content Sniffing impact on HTTPbis - #155

• From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
• Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 01:29:48 +1000
• To: HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
• Message-Id: <DE23064B-84F1-456A-B22D-6F77B7CBF2E9@mnot.net>

<http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/155>

The text in question is in p3 section 3.2.1:
> If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field,  
> the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of  
> its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify  
> the resource. If the media type remains unknown, the recipient  
> SHOULD treat it as type "application/octet-stream".
>
Two possible approaches AFAICT;

1) remove the text "If and only if the media type is not given by a  
Content-Type field", leaving the specification of the sniffing  
algorithm to a separate document (possibly with some further  
constraints to discourage sniffing unless it's controlled, but this  
would be necessarily vague), or

2) specify the algorithm to use if sniffing is done by referring to  
draft-abarth-mime-sniff directly.

Thoughts? Other suggestions?


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

Received on Monday, 1 June 2009 15:30:29 UTC