Re: Microsoft's "I mean it" content-type parameter

William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
> ...
>> If they assume that fixing all the bust clients they have been shipping
>> for years is infeasible, then I think they would have concluded its the
>> right way.
> 
> Of course, this repairs all the bust clients no more effectively than
> changing their behavior to conform to RFC2616 in the first place.
> ...

Many more clients to content sniffing, and the HTML5 draft suggests it's 
  the right thing to do...

>> I think its bogus - it requires every web site author in existence to
>> change their site to fix a defect in MSIE. Thats got to be harder to
>> deploy than just a hotfix to MSIE to not sniff at all. 'Sorry, bad idea,
>> fixed in hotfix #12345.'
> 
> Well, at least every administrator.
> 
> I find this statement from the blog very telling;
> 
> "For instance, if Internet Explorer finds HTML content in a file delivered
> with the HTTP response header Content-Type: text/plain, IE determines that
> the content should be rendered as HTML. Because of the number of legacy
> servers on the web (e.g. those that serve all files as text/plain)
> MIME-sniffing is an important compatibility feature."
>
> It would be very fun to see the example they cite, I sincerely doubt they
> exist to any legitimate extent today.  Our friends crawling the web could
> probably give us hard numbers.  I suspect the short history goes;
> ...

As a matter of fact, I can't even reproduce that *specific* case with 
IE6 and IE7, see 
<http://hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/http/content-type/013.html>. Not sure what 
I'm missing here...

 > ...
> This makes no more sense than their lifting Content-Disposition into http,
> but there you go, it's there.  Until more major MS customers move entirely
> to Firefox or other alternatives, I don't anticipate this patchwork 
> approach
> changing.  And few content providers are so lucky as to dictate their
> browser client.
> ...

Hm, what does this have to do with Content-Disposition?

> ...

BR, Julian

Received on Thursday, 3 July 2008 07:43:23 UTC