Manifest MIME type (detailed review of Offline Web applications)

(This is part of my detailed review of Offline Web applications.)

The spec says:

    Manifests must be served using the text/cache-manifest MIME type.

What is the advantage of using text/cache-manifest over text/plain?

I think using text/cache-manifest has the following problems:

    * Servers don't have a file extension that maps to text/cache-manifest,
      so manifests are likely to end up being mislabeled as text/plain or
      text/html, which in turn makes browsers that ignore the Content-Type
      work with more content than browsers that honor it. (This is also why
      it would be a bad idea to introduce a new MIME type for XBL.)

    * If you try to view a manifest in a browser, then if it was
      text/cache-manifest existing browsers will promt the user to download
      the file instead of just viewing it directly. This is not a biggie but
      sucks for Web app developers and might make them to rather label
      manifests as text/plain.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2007 11:16:02 UTC