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

On Aug 20, 2007, at 10:14 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:

>
> 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.

I think Lachlan's point was something like this:

Handling application/xml by rendering the content based on the XML  
language used is expected and appropriate handling for that MIME type.  
It is not a form of content sniffing in the same sense as treating  
text/plain as text/html would be.

So while it may be valuable to have a way to say "this is really the  
content type, please don't sniff", your example does not make a very  
strong case for it, since browsers are in their rights to do custom  
rendering of any XML content type based on the namespaces used in the  
contents.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 20 August 2007 18:26:18 UTC