On Sat, May 12, 2001 at 09:23:21PM -0400, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> On Sat, May 12, 2001 at 04:42:09PM -0700, Brendan Eich wrote:
> > Gervase Markham wrote:
> >
> > > Brendan Eich wrote:
> > > > > Does anyone object to this course of action? It goes without saying that
> > > > > this pref would have _no_ user UI.
> > > >
> > > > I have no problem with it; I also have no problem with a short default pref
> > > > that's better than */*. I do not like the image/{png,jpeg,gif} proposal you
> > > > quote above (what about mng? what about next year's model for which inline
> > > > image decoders can be field upgraded?). Would it work to do
> > > > image/gif;q=0.9, image/*;q=1 ?
> > >
> > > The current proposal is current because it was the only sensible
> > > suggestion made in the bug. Now is as good a time as any for other
> > > suggestions :-) My reading of the RFC suggests image/gif;q=0.9, image/*
> > > would work.
> > >
> > > However, saying that all image types are equally acceptable causes
> > > forward-compatibility problems - if a new image type arrives that
> > > Mozilla doesn't support, it will be sent in preference to GIF, which it
> > > does, and possibly in preference to JPG and PNG because they are all of
> > > equal precedence.
> >
> > (Death to GIFs! Let them eat PNGs. :-)
> >
> > I suppose we could enumerate known image types as you propose (but did you leave
> > out image/mng, or is that covered by png?), and keep going (it's not as if new
> > types emerge that frequently). Something about it rubs me the wrong way. More
> > when I figure out what that is.
Sorry if I'm covering old ground here, but it seems like you're
dividing between saying:
"I like all currently supported media types better than GIF."
or:
"I like everything, including unsupported media types, better than
GIF."
You can say the latter with
image/gif;q=0.9, image/*;q=1
but the former requires possibly lengthly enumeration. I caution
against the latter as it does not express the actuall preferences
and therefor encourages ugly heuristics like user agent sniffing.
Of course, one can always not express a preference at all and count
on the server preferring to serve png over gif. That's
AddType image/svg;qs=0.85 svg svgz
AddType image/png;qs=0.7 png
AddType image/jpeg;qs=0.8 jpg jpeg
AddType image/gif;qs=0.5 gif
in apache-speak, but that isn't distributed in the default conf so
i doubt it's widely deployed.
I don't see a good way around enumeration without getting everyone in
the world to agree on and implement (simultaneously) some sane subsets
of the media types with macro identifiers like
application/image-set-1.
A more terse protocol could leverage off the existence of the registry
and use a bit position to identify a media type (something like 6E;q=1
implies jpeg,png,svg,tiff,jiff at q=1) but hey, that's not the world
we live in.
Please let me know if I've mis{understood,represented} the issue. I'll
discuss this mail with folks at W3 and see if they have usefull input.
--
-eric
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
feel free to forward this message to any forum.
