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

Mark Baker wrote:

> "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 [...]"

The draft text above is correct as it stands - if there's no media type 
provided, the error case we're discussing can't occur.  You're arguing 
that it would be worth saying that it's OK to guess in the case where 
there's no media-type header?  Not sure that's worth the trouble of 
asserting, but if people really want to... -Tim