Jon Barnett wrote:
<snip>
Prompting a user for any sort of consent would be useless and confusing,
because users don't know what MIME types are. Even a dialog that says
"This
document claims to be plain text, but looks like a hypertext document. Do
you want to render it as a hypertext document?" would be useless and
confusing because, frankly, users don't know the difference between plain
text, web pages, and Microsoft Word.
Trying to outguess the author or server configuration is not necessary,
and IMO is beyond the scope of the browser. The /knowledgeable/ user
could be given a means of switching MIME types within the UA's tools. I
don't see any compelling reason, though.
<snip>
I understand your concern. You want authors to correct mistakes in their
code (and server configurations) to comply with standards. Authors should
be encouraged to do so, but only in ways that are not detrimental to end
users. End users don't make a good middle man for telling an author when
his code doesn't agree with a spec. End users tend to blame the browser
first.
Absolutely. Authors and server admins have the responsibility to get
things right. What I do not understand is how having a browser follow
the rules is detrimental to the user. On the contrary, ignoring the
server or meta content-type is harmful. Others have cited examples.
The author is the first user, depending on his test-bed UAs to show him
his errors. Not all end users are gormless, and their feedback is
valuable.
cheers,
gary
--
Anyone can make a usable web site. It takes a graphic
designer to make it slow, confusing and painful to use.
