Re: Title of the HTML5 document

On May 25, 2009, at 7:17 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:

>
> Since my beliefs were called into question, here's what I believe:
>
> (1) I believe that (regrettably) that the sniffing of feeds needs to  
> be specified somewhere.  I say regrettably as I know of nobody who  
> feels that this is an ideal situation, instead it is behavior that  
> is interoperability being implemented by browsers to deal with  
> reality as it exists as opposed to a Platonic ideal.
>
> (2) This sniffing is browser behavior.  There are a number of other  
> user agents that don't perform this behavior.  In fact, without  
> testing, I'm confident that the example you site ('NetNewsWire')  
> doesn't implement this behavior.  Even if it does, I'm sure I can  
> find countless others that don't.  Of course, those that don't have  
> this behavior don't claim to be HTML5 compliant.  The purpose of  
> documenting this behavior isn't to force change in those  
> applications, but to provide an documented and interoperable  
> alternative should the authors of those applications wish to  
> implement it.
>
> (3) At the present time, I have no position as to whether or not  
> this belongs in a separate document, but do believe that
>
>  (3a) whatever document it belongs in needs a suitable subtitle and
>       abstract that covers this content.
>
>  (3b) ensuring that the subtitle and abstract of the current HTML5
>       draft matches the subsequent content will make the consensus
>       review of such content go much more smoothly.
>
> Is any of this not clear?  Do you disagree with any of it?

I disagree with point (2). Before I made my claim about NetNewsWire, I  
tested. I served copies of the following documents with a text/html  
MIME type, using a local Apache server, and also separately with an  
application/xml MIME type:

http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/home.rss
http://intertwingly.net/blog/index.atom

NetNewsWire successfully processed subscriptions to text/html and  
application/xml versions of these feeds and let me browse the news  
items. I don't know what exact sniffing rules NetNewsWire uses, but  
clear it has some. Just in case I lucked out and picked the only news  
reader with sniffing, I just now tried the following:

- NewsFire
- Shrook
- Vienna
- NewsLife

They all exhibited the same behavior as NetNewsWire.

Now, perhaps your objection is that these don't follow the exact  
sniffing rules as those proposed in the spec. But then, neither does  
Safari, and I suspect other browsers do not precisely match these  
rules either.

Or perhaps the point is that these newsreaders will content sniff  
feeds served with any MIME type whatsoever. I could not rule out that  
hypothesis with my brief experiment. It seems to me such behavior  
would be worse than something along the lines of the spec.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 25 May 2009 14:42:36 UTC