- From: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 15:10:27 +0900
- To: Roy T.Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, W3C TAG <www-tag@w3.org>
This is an interesting discussion and it illustrates something that
we have a tendency to forget often at W3C.
Le 9 août 06 à 13:19, Roy T. Fielding a écrit :
>> With all due respect, standards are of no use when they aren't
>> followed.
>
> Standards tell people the right way to do something for everyone
> concerned. If people choose to do things the wrong way for their
> own selfish reasons, then they are liable for the result. Standards
> cannot define irresponsible behavior as the norm and expect the rest
> of the system to work. Eventually, one of the browser vendors will
> stop copying every mistake made by the others and let the market
> decide for itself.
The discussion is around this.
* Some resources are available on the Web with the wrong mimetype
- Servers do a bad job because often of misconfiguration.
- Browsers do content sniffing because of this
-> Then vicious circles or chicken-egg problems.
All of that is perfectly logical and we can throw stones to one side
or the other and it will not achieve a lot. I'm more interested at
"What would be the mechanism to improve
the implementations and the bad situation of mime type?"
Fixing implementations is a noble goal and I'm pretty sure Ian is
doing that a lot. Taking care of the user is a noble goal too.
I see one missing player in the debate we are having: "Authoring
resources".
Authoring a resource is a mix of server-user agent interactions.
Because of history and bad support of HTTP PUT, the creation of
resources has escaped for a long time the Web paradigm. Creation of
resources is not done on the Web, but most of the time in another
space (database, filesystem, etc.) then the resource is "made
available" on the Web (scripting, FTP, etc.).
The issue is here. When we create a resource on the Web, how do we
ensure.
1. It has the right mimetype
2. The mimetype can be changed by the owner of the resource (or his/
her tool).
(Right now the mimetype is "owned by the server")
3. How a user agent which would have done a successful recovery
could suggest to the server and the owner of the resource that the
mime-type is wrong.
Basically how to put in place a programmatic way of improving the
state of content-type on the Web by modifying servers and tools which
create resources.
--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***
Received on Wednesday, 9 August 2006 06:10:49 UTC