- From: William F. Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 12:32:09 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-talk@w3.org
- Cc: onank@kanald.com.tr
Usal Onan KARAGOZOGLU <onank@kanald.com.tr> writes to www-talk@w3.org on Thu, 6 Apr 2000 16:10:08 +0300: > What does the extension *.stm stand for? And what does it do? Suffixes have NO MEANING across the network. Most end-user clients (i.e., browsers) offer a page-information function so that a user can determine the content-type of an item served through http. That topic is, in fact, not appropriate for this list. But perhaps it *is* appropriate for me, with slight change of topic, to complain about a user client (which I happened to find on a piece of hardware purchased new three months ago) disregarding the http content-type header in favor of what it perceived as a "suffix" in a url. Misbehavior is compounded into absurdity by the nature of this particular inferred suffix, which is ".sgml" served with content-type "text/plain", and, which, apparently, this client thinks is something it knows how to render as other than text/plain, with the result that much of the text/plain content is lost. I tolerated this when I saw it in 1996, but it has been wrong since the dawn of HTTP/1.0, and I find it outrageous now. Beyond that I believe that there is a tacit understanding that no general purpose user client will ever get any closer to internal handling of "text/sgml" than for internal handling of "text/xml". Isn't that exactly why XML is sponsored by W3C? It should never be assumed that "text/sgml" is "text/xml". Absent user (or site) client configuration for an external application, an item served as "text/sgml" should be reported as not renderable and the user offered a "download". And let's hope that user clients in general avoid being territorial about "text/xml" by always honoring a user (or site) configuration of an external application for that content-type. William F. Hammond Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics 518-442-4625 The University at Albany hammond@math.albany.edu Albany, NY 12222 (U.S.A.) http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/ Dept. FAX: 518-442-4731 Never trust an SGML/XML vendor whose web page is not valid HTML. And always support affirmative action on behalf of the finite places.
Received on Thursday, 6 April 2000 12:32:39 UTC