Re: Why Microsoft's authoritative=true won't work and is a bad idea

Ian Hickson wrote on 07/05/2008 09:53:51 PM:
>
> On Sat, 5 Jul 2008, Sam Ruby wrote:
> > > >
> > > > There are only two workable solutions. [a and b]
> > >
> > > [b] fails to achieve the only goal here, interoperability. So there's

> > > only one workable solution.
> >
> > Slight disagreement here: there are multiple potentially workable
> > solutions.
>
> You said there were two, I pointed out why one of those two isn't a
> solution, and now there are multiple? I'm confused.

What I originally said was:

"One is to declare that this combination of value for _official_ type and
parameters and pattern detected in the content itself maps to a specific
_sniffed type_, which would require at least two browsers to change."

We both agree on that one.  Unfortunately, I would have been clearer if the
word "this" were replace with the words "a given", where what is currently
in the HTML5 specification is one possible combination, what is in RFC 2616
is another possible combination, what IE7 currently implements is another,
what is proposed for IE8 is another, etc.

Sorry for the confusion.

> > > the key is to find a solution that can reach a steady state. The "I
> > > really mean it" parameter doesn't (since it will end up used on pages

> > > that aren't labelled correctly, and so other browsers won't support
it
> > > as it would lead to them supporting fewer pages).
> >
> > Any documented solution, including the one in the current draft,
suffers
> > from the above. Pages will be lagelled incorrectly.  Yes, even with the

> > rules captured by the current draft of HTML5.
>
> I think you are missing the key difference here.
>
> With what the spec says, which is the status quo plus or minus the delta
> between implementations, we have already run through the people making
the
> mistakes and have already gotten to a pretty stable steady state.

Simply put, I'm not seeing the "status quo" that you describe here.  Since
we seem to be so far apart here, let me put in in the form of a question.
Considering the following content:

http://feedvalidator.org/testcases/atom/1.1/brief-noerror.xml

When I visit that page, I would like the text "No errors should be produced
by the minimal feed" to be visible.  I've read the spec.  I've tried
various combinations of content-type parameters.  I've gotten it to work
with Opera 9.50, but have failed to find any combination of values to place
in the content-type parameter that works with IE 7.0.5730.13, Firefox 3.0,
or Safari 3.1.2.

>From my read of the spec, this should be possible.  From my experience with
the browsers I have cited, if there is a stable steady state, it is quite a
distance from what I read in the spec.

What am I missing?  In particular, what do you recommend for the content
type of the testcase I cited above?

- Sam Ruby