- From: Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>
- Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 08:52:57 -0700
- To: 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 11:47:58 UTC