RE: Disclaimer for Authoritative Metadata (ACTION-793)


> > In fact, there are no current W3C or IETF specifications that "work against"
> the "Web architecture" in this way.
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#determining-the-character-

> encoding
> treats BOM as more authoritative than HTTP Content-Type if you want to
> get technical about this.

IF you want to get technical, it's up to the media type (text/html) to define the 
meaning of the parameters. RFC 4288   lays out only minimal constraints
on how the charset parameter is to be interpreted, it only requires
that if there's a parameter

   The "text" media type is intended for sending material that is
   principally textual in form.  A "charset" parameter MAY be used to
   indicate the charset of the body text for "text" subtypes, notably
   including the subtype "text/plain", which is a generic subtype for
   plain text defined in [RFC2046].  If defined, a text "charset"
   parameter MUST be used to specify a charset name defined in
   accordance to the procedures laid out in [RFC2978].

I think the main thing is to contain sniffing and media type guessing to
only 'modern browsers' and not let it infect non-browsing contexts.

The arguments for sniffing have been:

 -  'misconfigured web sites'
- PLUS no way to reconfigure
- PLUS existing browsers sniff
- PLUS browsers don't want to stop sniffing because
   if they don't, users will switch to a browser that DOES sniff


that is, all four of the conditions have to hold for sniffing to
be a good idea to propagate. 

While that might apply to hyperlinks and transclusion FROM 
HTML documents, I don't think it applies to network APIs, 
applications other than browsers, (SIP? Instant messaging?
 hyperlinks from content other than HTML?).

There are better ways to make the previous TAG finding
on "authoritative metadata" be consistent with current browser
behavior without tearing down the infrastructure for use
by other applications.

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Friday, 5 April 2013 22:41:08 UTC