- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 20:56:10 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Cc: Thomas DeWeese <Thomas.DeWeese@Kodak.com>, www-svg@w3.org, ietf-types@iana.org
On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: >> >> Huh? If the network layer detects that the HTTP response is in fact >> GZip encoded even though the header isn't set and decodes it why is >> this a problem? > > Because such software does not interoperate with software that does not > perform such error correction. Would you also argue that for a ISO-8859- > 1 encoded document [...] > I am not sure where you draw the line between errors this "network > layer" may correct. Indeed; the logical conclusion of the "correct it in the network layer" thinking is how you get to the world where IE will treat anything that happens to contain the string "<html>" as an HTML document, even if it is sent as text/plain. That kind of "magic error fixing" has security implications (hence why XPSP2 reduced the amount of sniffing in IE). I would strongly recommend that specs disallow sniffing of any kind, treating all metadata as authorative (and giving explicit priorities to handle metadata contradictions). In certain rare cases where sniffing is required due to missing metadata (as in the lack of byte order information when no authorative default is stated), then the sniffing performed should be well defined in order to allow all UAs to have exact interoperability. IMHO. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Wednesday, 8 December 2004 20:56:12 UTC