Re: review of content type rules by IETF/HTTP community

Sam Ruby wrote:
> 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.

I don't understand the grounds upon which you are claiming that 
Firefox's and IE's behaviour is broken.  Both choose to process the 
feeds and present the content in a more useful way to the user.  I 
understand why you, as a developer, might wish to see the XML tree, but 
that's not at all useful to a typical user.

Would you consider it a bug for Firefox to render XHTML, SVG or MathML 
that is served as application/xml, instead of showing the XML tree? 
What makes a feed special in this regard?  The various forms of RSS and 
Atom are just documents with defined semantics, and the browser is just 
using those semantics to interpret and render the document appropriately.

> 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.

I think the solution would be for you, as a user, to configure your own 
browser to display the content in the most appropriate way for you.  In 
this case, I'm not sure if Firefox, IE or any other browsers do provide 
a way to achieve what you want, but that decision is really up to the 
browser vendors.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Monday, 20 August 2007 16:08:07 UTC