- From: Sam Ruby <rubys@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:14:16 -0400
- To: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- CC: "public-html@w3.org WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Lachlan Hunt wrote: > 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. It would be helpful if you were to look at my testcase, linked above. It is not only a use case (for respecting the indicated MIME types), but also is a test case (a test case for a feed validator). The intended audience for THIS SPECIFIC DOCUMENT is developers. It is not something that I expect anybody to subscribe to. It is not something that changes. Its existence predated the change introduced in IE7. > 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. Again, I think you are missing my point. Random Joe user puts a feed up, and the host serves it as text/html. It happens more often than you might think[1]. The current behavior of IE7 and Firefox and others is to sniff the content and display it as a feed. I have no problem with that. Meanwhile, I put a test case up, and serve it intentionally as application/xml. Given these two diverse use cases, how can I configure my own browser to display the content "in the most appropriate way for me" if there is no way for me to distinguish these two cases? All I am asking for is for an architected way to serve selected content in a way that "opts out" of content sniffing for that specific request, and have my wishes respected in a large percentage of the browsers deployed a decade from now. - Sam Ruby [1] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2006/03/13/Common-Feed-Errors
Received on Monday, 20 August 2007 17:14:29 UTC