RE: img issue: should we restrict the URI

From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Jeff Schiller
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2008 11:37 PM
To: Ian Hickson
Cc: HTML WG
Subject: Re: img issue: should we restrict the URI

> First - I do not think we should restrict the URI.  For example
> http://www.example.com/foo.php could return image/png.  Originally, I
thought maybe the
> idea was to restrict the URIs to some predefined set of file prefixes
(.png, .gif, .jpg,
> etc) - but I then realized that it was asking the question of whether the
resource that
> the URI points to should be of a certain list of types.

Since determining type by extension is fairly irrelevant on the Web (as you
point out), the URI should not be restricted.

> One simple option would be to state that the (proposed) MIME type of the
resource must
> begin with "image/".  If that, for some reason, is not sufficient then I
think we have to
> go deeper and figure out what the purpose of a html:img element is.

I agree with this, but it would also need to stipulate that merely having a
MIME type start with "image/" is not sufficient for a user agent to be
required to support it, particularly since many image MIME types require a
fairly "heavy" viewer (like a Photoshop document) or a proprietary format
(like QuickTime).

J.Ja

Received on Wednesday, 30 July 2008 05:25:52 UTC