- From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Date: 22 May 2002 12:03:21 -0400
- To: www-tag@w3.org
On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 11:52, Tantek =?ISO-8859-1?B?xw==?=elik wrote: > 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). Uh, Tantek? I think the XML community has little or no patience for the notion that the user-agent is supposed to fix errors made by the author. If I remember correctly, this draconian notion came from both Microsoft (are you still at MS?) and Netscape, who were tired of having to deal with such issues on a regular basis. However much it may pain the generous souls maintaining browsers, it's reasonably clear that such forgiveness isn't helping anyone, and pretty much just encourages more bad behavior. > 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? Typically the owners of a Web site would be smart to test their site in software which actually conforms to the rules specifying the technology used to create the site. > 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. Which is perhaps why ALL UA's should be expected to enforce the rules equally lest bad behavior become a marketing point. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com
Received on Wednesday, 22 May 2002 11:59:12 UTC