- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 16:52:51 -0500
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Cc: John Kemp <john@jkemp.net>, "www-tag@w3.org WG" <www-tag@w3.org>
Larry Masinter writes: > I am strongly opposed to promoting content-type sniffing to be > an architectural principle. > > I find it only marginally acceptable to ALLOW content-type sniffing > by conforming receiving agents, when there is clear, compelling and > overwhelming evidence that there is a significant amount of > of content that *needs* sniffing, and in that case, the "sniffing" > specification should not *mandate* sniffing but merely allow it, > and discourage its use. > > However, no future design, context, application, W3C recommendation > or other specification should be encouraged to "sniff" content > and interpret message content based on unreliable heuristics > overriding unambiguous content labels. I agree. Furthermore, the draft text really doesn't explain how allowance for sniffing would change the rest of the SDW story. After all, we give examples in which providers of data are held legally accountable for having published certain content, precisely because the chain of normative specifications makes clear their correct interpretation. In a world where people start to "sniff", am I accountable for the (mis) interpretation of something served as text/plain that just happens to resemble some other media type? The whole point of SDW is to tell stories like that. So, I agree with Larry that we should steer clear of elevating sniffing to being even a good practice at the architecture level (it's not a "principle" in the sense of AWWW principles in any case); even if we do want to acknowledge that widespread use of sniffing in practice in a revised SDW, I think it behooves us to carefully explain how the core stories about accountability and lack of ambiguity are affected. I think we have two choices: 1) leave SDW alone -- it tells a quite coherent story at the architecture level, and we can view instances of sniffing as deviations from the architecture or 2) do a very careful job of explaining just what does and doesn't change in the SDW story given that sniffing happens. Noah -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Wednesday, 6 January 2010 21:50:37 UTC