RE: Proposed TAG Finding: Internet Media Type registration, consi stency of use

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tantek Çelik [mailto:tantek@cs.stanford.edu] 

> 
> > Second guessing behavior, while useful for entrenched companies to 
> > reenforce dependencies on implementation quirks, has 
> effects that are 
> > deleterious to the long-term health of the web.
> 
> This is nonsense.
> 
> There is nothing stopping web servers from fixing their 
> configuration files etc. to return proper mime types.
> 

I think the issue is that the web server DOES have a correct configuration
file and DOES correctly return a propert mime type - yet the browser does
not obey that response header. This is especially true when 'text/plain' is
used with data that
has content sort of similar to HTML (there are probably other more clear
examples).

Another point, if the user agent does not obey a specified content-type -
possibly displaying something as plain text even though angle brackets exist
in the content - how will authors know that their configuration files need
fixing? It will appear to be working fine and the configuration file will
remain broken.

Received on Wednesday, 22 May 2002 15:52:01 UTC