Re: Content Sniffing impact on HTTPbis - #155

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> <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?

2) is problematic, as a normative downref to draft-abarth-mime-sniff 
would be a downref; I don't think this is acceptable even if it's for an 
optional feature.

1) sounds good to me.

BR, Julian