My colleagues and I have put together a web site that makes it easy to compare the mime signatures used by Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, Google Chrome, and the HTML 5 specification:
http://webblaze.cs.berkeley.edu/2009/content-sniffing/ I'm hoping we can use this information to converge the content sniffing algorithms used by different browsers and then update the HTML 5 spec to reflect the consensus. I know some changes to the content sniffing algorithm will be contentious (such as whether to sniff HTML from text/plain), but I'm hoping other changes will be easier. For example, Firefox, IE, and Safari all use different signatures for JPEG. When I raised this issue before on this list, I got the impression that the WebKit project was generally receptive to changing its content sniffing algorithm. Get the ball rolling, I'd suggest making the following changes: 1) Remove the fourth byte of the JPEG signature to match Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and the HTML 5 spec. (Internet Explorer uses a two-byte signature.) 2) Add a signature for GIF. Currently, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and the HTML 5 spec all have signatures for GIF, but Safari 3.1 does not. 3) Add a signature for PNG. Currently, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and the HTML 5 spec all have signatures for PNG, but Safari 3.1 does not. I think the next logical set is for me to file a bug about these issues, but I wanted to send an email to the list to provide some context for that bug report. Thanks, Adam _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
