Re: comments on draft-barth-mime-sniffing

Speaking personally -- that's all fine and good and understandable,  
but why can't I as a user turn it off, either as a preference or on a  
case-by-case basis? Sometimes "going the extra mile" gets it wrong,  
and as with any heuristic, there needs to be a way to say "no, don't  
do that!"

E.g., how hard is it to have an unintrusive non-modal indication that  
the type was sniffed, giving the user the option to view it without  
sniffing (as FF does when it asks you if you want to remember a  
password)? This isn't perfect (e.g., because there can still be  
unwanted side effects of loading the document with the incorrect media  
type), but it's a good step in the right direction...

I know that implementing that take developer time, but how much  
developer time has been sunk on these discussions already? ;)

Cheers,



On 17/06/2009, at 2:42 PM, Dave Singer wrote:

> I suspect that the problem is partly economic.  Faces with bug  
> reports etc. saying "it doesn't work right" we can either explain  
> endlessly what people have got wrong...or we can sharply reduce the  
> number of such calls (which cost money) by sniffing.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I don't like sniffing.  But I don't think a  
> stroke of Ian's pen will make it go away.
>
> (It's also odd to have a spec. which bars the user agent from 'going  
> the extra mile'. Specs classically say all the things you must do to  
> be conformant, and generally can't stop you from doing more.)
>
>
> At 23:31 -0500 6/16/09, Shane McCarron wrote:
>> This is my favorite comment in this thread, bar none!  Why, oh why  
>> are you all trying so hard to continue to support broken behavior  
>> instead of slapping down the people who insist on doing it wrong?  
>> If the user agents (go Firefox!) just refused to sniff, then no one  
>> would send nonsense content.  'cause it wouldn't work.
>> Robert O'Callahan wrote:
>>> I should also point out that so far we have had approximately zero  
>>> complaints from authors about the fact that Firefox doesn't sniff.
>>>
>>> Rob
>
> -- 
> Dave Singer
> Apple Computer/QuickTime 408 974 3162
>


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

Received on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 12:51:15 UTC