Re: Manifest MIME type (detailed review of Offline Web applications)

On 10/3/07, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:
>
> (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?

Because the text/plain specification doesn't reference the HTML 5 specification.

> 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.)

By that reasoning, we better just stop with new media types
altogether.  Freeze the registry! 8-P

The Apache mime.types file is kept up to date with the IANA media type
registry, and is used to seed many Web servers.  It is indeed possible
to roll out new media types over time.

>    * 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.

That's silly behaviour.  User agents are licensed to interpret unknown
text/* types as text/plain, so I see no reason for a "save as" dialog.
 More importantly though, I don't expect many folks will be clicking
on links to cache manifests.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.         http://www.markbaker.ca
Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies  http://www.coactus.com

Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2007 18:28:18 UTC