- From: Sam Ruby <rubys@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:09:15 -0400
- To: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- CC: "public-html@w3.org WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Dan Connolly wrote: > The Feed/HTML sniffing review comment reminded me... since > the scope of the HTML 5 spec overlaps with the scope > of the HTTP spec, we should get review by the IETF/HTTP > community (including the W3C TAG). > > I just packaged the relevant section > http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#content-type-sniffing > as an Internet Draft-to-be, with this introduction: > > > ---8<--- > > The HTTP specification[HTTP], in section 14.17 Content-Type, says The > Content-Type entity-header field indicates the media type of the > entity-body sent to the recipient. > > The HTML 5 specification[HTML5] specifies an algorithm for determining > content types based on widely deployed practices and software. > > These specifications conflict in some cases. (@@ extract a test cases > from Step 10 of Feed/HTML sniffing (part of detailed review of > "Determining the type of a new resource in a browsing context")) > > According to a straightforward architecture for content types in the > Web[META], the HTTP specification should suffice and the HTML 5 > specification need not specify another algorithm. But that architecture > assumes that Web publishers (server adminstrators and content > developers) reliably label content. Observing that labelling by Web > publishers is widely unreliable, and software that works around these > problems is widespread, the choices seem to be: > > * Convince Web publishers to fix incorrectly labelled Web content > and label it correctly in the future. > * Update the HTTP specification to match widely deployed > conventions captured in the HTML 5 draft. > > While the second option is unappealing, the first option seems > infeasible. > > The IETF community is invited to review the details of the HTML 5 > algorithm in detail. On this subject, I have a request. I'll phrase it as a mild rant, but I fully understand why firefox made the change that it did. The following is a test case: http://feedvalidator.org/testcases/atom/1.1/brief-noerror.xml The response contains the content type of application/xml as I wanted to view the data in an XML parse tree. Even though what I sent was per spec, and used to work, firefox decided that the need to emulate IE's broken behavior was more important than respecting my expressed wishes. While I don't expect this to be fixed, I would like to request that there be some parameter (like, "application/xml; damnit") which indicates that I think I know what I'm doing and would appreciate being treated like an adult. Thanks for listening. - Sam Ruby
Received on Friday, 17 August 2007 21:09:31 UTC