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

Just my personal response (i.e. not for the XMLP WG) ...

In general, this is quite good.  The only part I have an objection to is
this bit;

"It is a serious error for the response body to be inconsistent with
the assertions made about it by the MIME headers. 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."

While this might be technically correct, it is missing a very important
piece of information; that the media type may be guessed only in a very
specific case.  IMO, RFC 2616 section 7.2.1 does a better job at
explaining the situation;

"If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the
recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its
content [...]"

Thanks.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Tuesday, 21 May 2002 20:37:11 UTC