jon at spin dot ie wrote, > However, rather than being a judgement call on whether authors are more likely > to include incorrect declarations (which they are) or server administrators to > set incorrect headers (which they are also), the policy of having the HTTP > header over-ride the contained declaration has a sound technical basis: > > The author was not the last entity to "touch" the document, the server was. As > such the server could have re-encoded the document (as some servers and other > agents may do with text/* documents) without altering any self-description > features specific to that particular type of document. As such assuming a > reasonable degree of competence on the part of both author and server only the > server's description of the encoding can be trusted.
Suppose you made a document and sent it to me via conventional post. The last agent handling the document would be the mail carrier. Does the mail carrier have the right to open the mailing and replace your document with garbage? An analogy: Author = Host Document = Wine Reader = Guest Server = Cup If the host pours a cup of wine for the guest, would we allow a mere cup to adulterate our wine? Best regards, James Kass .
