- From: Nick Kew <nick@webthing.com>
- Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 14:11:16 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
As you know, Liam and I have contributed patches to SP, including improved HTTP support (virtual hosts and redirection). In the context of the W3C validator, this applies whenever the validator has to fetch an external DTD. One element of this was the use of an "Accept: text/*" header when SP retrieves a document via HTTP. The rationale for this is that SP has no use for non-text documents, and so shouldn't try to fetch them. In recent correspondence, Liam has suggested that this may not in fact be the best, or even correct, thing to do: (1) Not the best, because it can give rise to confusion when users understand markup but not HTTP. (2) Not correct, because MIME types are defined for "application/[sg|x]ml" and various other markup. With regard to (1), I would be reluctant to open the "let's ignore HTTP because we know better" issue: we've seen just how damaging it is when Microsoft does the same thing. OTOH I cannot actually envisage a case when fetching a non-text document will do anything more damage than a wasted transaction. The most obvious effect of changing it would be to forgive a misconfigured server that sends DTDs as "application/octet-stream". Regarding (2), I don't think I understand when it would be right to use "application/*ml" in preference to "text/*ml". Perhaps it would be appropriate in cases where SGML is simply used as storage for another format: <!NOTATION JPEG SYSTEM ""> but that kind of thing is clearly not useful to a validator. So the questions for discussion are: (1) What MIME types *should* we accept? (2) If we accept an incorrect MIME type, should we report it as an error? (3) If a server returns an HTTP 406 response (refuses to send a document because it shouldn't be acceptable), how should we report the error? See "My page doesn't validate" from about March 12th on this list for an example. -- Nick Kew Desparate to escape the UK right now: can anyone use my skills? <URL:http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html>
Received on Friday, 6 April 2001 09:10:41 UTC