Re: obeying the protocol

"William F. Hammond" wrote:
> 
> 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.

This is, unfortunately, explicitly documented design of a very
popular implementation:

	"One problem with this is that some browsers sniff the document
	irrespective of MIME-type and display the content if it looks like
	HTML according to some heuristic[InetSDK], Appendix A."

	[InetSDK] 
	     Internet Client SDK, December 19, 1997, Microsoft Corporation "
	-- http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-xh-19980511

Hmm... they don't keep appendix A there any more.
http://www.microsoft.com/msdn/sdk/inetsdk/help/itt/monikers/appendix_a.htm

hmm... actually, they do service that address, but in a strange way...
let's see if I can find the new documentation...
"The Internet Client SDK section has been moved as a result of our
recent
  redesign."
	-- http://msdn.microsoft.com/redirs/inetsdkredir.asp


I don't see "Appendix A" listed in that guide. I give up; maybe they've
stopped documenting that practice... who knows... maybe they've even
stopped doing it in more recent software releases!

> Never trust an SGML/XML vendor whose web page is not valid HTML.

oops...

Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML
parser. 

     Line 68, column 63: 

       ... cs.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/" ADD_DATE="902127218"
                                              ^

     Error: there is no attribute "ADD_DATE"

	-- http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

gotta fix that right away...

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 6 April 2000 13:39:02 UTC