[Bug 7744] Is sniffing required?

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7744





--- Comment #20 from Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>  2010-02-09 10:00:07 ---
"... it recommends that UAs should not sniff, but if they do, they
should use this specific algorithm, not any others. HTML5 does not want that
set of recommendations (either don't sniff, or if you do, use this algorithm)
to be optional, though specifically choosing the sniffing side of that fork is
optional...."

It is nonsensical to say that "HTML5 does not want". There is no entity "HTML5"
that "wants" something. If sniffing is optional (that either sniffing or not
sniffing areconforming), there is no reason why it should be non-complaint to,
say, sniff for HTML when confronted with text/plain but not sniff for PDF when
given text/plain.   The "all or nothing" advice on sniffing is inappropriate.

This is a comment on draft-abarth-mime-sniff-04 but is also a comment on the
HTML specification from which it was derived.  

Trying to provide an exact algorithm for sniffing makes this difficult to fix;
the right fix is to eliminate the algorithm and make normative constraints on
the results instead.


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Received on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 10:00:12 UTC