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

At 17:46  +0200 7/07/08, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>An alternative might be to add a header "look, I guessed it" when 
>>Apache adds a 'guessed' text/plain as the content-type, and say 
>>that browsers might take text/plain+IGuessed as something to sniff. 
>>This is like the proposed Microsoft header but the other way up...
>
>I agree that's nicer in theory. But how do we get all the existing 
>installations to change their DefaultType?

Well, someone has already said that the IE upgrade rate is less than 
50%.  There are a lot more clients (browsers) than servers out there, 
and system admins tend to be better at upgrading than users (because 
they get security fixes along with bug fixes).  So fixing the server 
end of the equation with an extra "look, I guessed, I might be wrong" 
might get us closer to a better position faster than fixing the 
browser end.  The "I guessed" message has, as a famous politician 
once said, the advantage of being true, which means there is no need 
to work around it etc.

Browsers could then detect that they (a) are talking to a server with 
this feature and (b) they get text/plain *without* "I guessed" and 
therefore (c) not sniff, but believe.
-- 
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime

Received on Monday, 7 July 2008 16:01:03 UTC