Re: Proposed TAG Finding: Internet Media Type registration, consistency of use (fwd)

At 05:12 PM 2002-05-22, Rob Lanphier wrote:
>This discussion on the www-tag alias may be of interest to the www-qa
>group.
>
>For the record, I strongly disagree with the position below (so please
>don't misattribute the following to me).

In the interest of a well-informed and coordinated process, note that there is a related issue (GC09-20 [media type]) involving with the SGRS specification.

 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-voice-wg/2002May/0043.html

Rob, are you suggesting that we run concurrent threads on www-tag and www-qa, or that those interested in Quality pick up the TAG thread?  What follow-up would you suggest, process-wise?

Al

>Rob
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 08:52:57 -0700
>From: Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>
>To: "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
>Subject: Re: Proposed TAG Finding: Internet Media Type registration,
>        consistency  of use
>Resent-Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 11:48:29 -0400 (EDT)
>Resent-From: www-tag@w3.org
>
>> http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2002/0129-mime
>
>Interesting if not a bit humorous (unintentionally I'm sure).
>
>This was my favorite part:
>
>  "An example of incorrect and dangerous behavior is a user-agent that reads
>some part of the body of a response and decides to treat it as HTML based on
>its containing a <!DOCTYPE declaration or <title> tag, when it was served as
>text/plain or some other non-HTML type."
>
>Incorrect and dangerous?
>
>While it is a laudable goal to avoid and/or limit sniffing when at all
>possible, unsubstantiated comments like these are inflammatory at best, and
>horribly naive at worst - given how many HTML (.html etc.) pages are still
>served as text/plain. (Nevermind GIFs and other images served as
>text/plain).
>
>My second favorite part:
>
>  "Web software SHOULD NOT attempt to recover from such errors by guessing,
>but SHOULD report the error to the user to allow intelligent corrective
>action."
>
>Typically a user of a web site does not have the ability to correct the
>website itself.  Nevermind perform an "intelligent corrective action".
>Which usability genius decided that it was a good idea to report errors to
>the user that are meaningless to the typical user (typical user has zero
>knowledge about mime types) and the user has no chance of fixing?
>
>If a UA did report such errors with a web site, the typical user would take
>the corrective action they usually take when errors are reported from a
>website, and that is to try a different UA.
>
>Tantek

Received on Wednesday, 22 May 2002 19:59:19 UTC