Re: Public beta test of the W3C Markup Validator

Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org> wrote:

>Ah, so you count all server setup as sniffing. That seems tobe a
>significant dilution of the term.

No, it's not "sniffing"; it's "guessing". And it's actively and
demonstrably harmfull, not to mention completely unmaintainable.

To wit, MSIE will treat will treat a document called "foo.gif" as HTML
regardless of any "image/gif" MIME type if it finds the string "<html"
somewhere in the first 256 bytes of the file. As Jim mentions, it's
impossible to know whether the author intended text/html or
application/xhtml+xml, or even image/svg+xml, for something with the
extension ".html". It could very well be intended as "XHTML+SVG"! Or not
have a filename extensions at all. Or...



-- 
I'm [less] than thrilled by the [VM situation]; all sides of it. I [think]
we need a [fork] in that area so that you guys would stop stepping on each
others' toes.  I'm taking no part in your merry 5-way clusterfuck  -- sort
that mess out between yourselves.                -- Alexander Viro on lkml

Received on Friday, 25 October 2002 13:55:42 UTC