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

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, Sam Ruby wrote:
>>> For what it's worth, I strongly agree with you that (for security 
>>> reasons if nothing else!) you should never have text/plain documents 
>>> that only use non-<control> characters sniffed and treated like HTML, 
>>> RSS, or Atom. Those documents should be treated as text/plain.
>>>
>>> At the moment, the spec backs that up.
>> Unfortunately, while you and I are on the same side, I can "pull an Ian" 
>> here, and provide plenty of counter examples. [1] :-(
> 
> Oh, indeed. However, there is one thing that may mitigate that and make 
> our life a lot easier here -- feeds generally are not visited directly, 
> they're found in rel=feed and rel=alternate links on HTML pages. So this 
> might be a non-issue basically.

I wish I could say that that is my experience.  Within the past week 
alone, I had somebody -- arguably someone whom to all evidence is 
reasonably technically astute -- ask me if I simply didn't do RSS as he 
didn't see any links to a feed on my page:

http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/08/09/Erlang-First-Impressions#c1187179911

I know that may seem like an isolated incident, but the fact that the 
overwhelming number of sites seem to feel compelled to add a direct and 
visible link to feeds (ones that arguably could, but rarely do at the 
present time, include a rel=feed attribute) is an indicator that 
"generally are not visited directly" is a bit of an overstatement.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Wednesday, 22 August 2007 01:54:54 UTC