Re: Content Sniffing impact on HTTPbis - #155

On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> 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

Yes, I proposed this before;

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2009AprJun/0018.html

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

I don't think that has any place in the HTTP spec, especially as even
the revised version continues to use prescriptive language that
supercedes key parts of the HTTP protocol.

Mark.

Received on Monday, 1 June 2009 19:31:07 UTC