On 7/21/10 9:10 AM, Nils Dagsson Moskopp wrote:
While the robustness principle is indeed a good start, this is a situation where we are mostly starting with a clean slate.
Maciej's point was that Safari doesn't feel like it's starting with a clean slate.
Lets not forget that the broken situation is one that is not commonly encountered with<video>, only with distinct proprietary plugins. Whoever can change the markup on the web site on this level, will, in most cases, be able to change the MIME type as well (adding one line to .htaccess for each type is not hard)
I believe this claim is false. There are plenty of people who can change the HTML but not the web server configuration, even on a per-directory basis....
so this is a minimal burden on site authors (or none at all for shared hosting, as soon as default MIME mapping for such media types has trickled into web server defaults).
You mean 7-8 years from now? For example, Apache 2 has been out since 2002, and yet Apache 1 is still fairly widely used...
So, carrying this inconsistency over to a standards-based world would make MIME types essentially useless for media content, necessitating a partial download and sniffing code, like unixoid FILE(1).
Yep; we're already there. The MIME type typically lists the container format only and then you have to either sniff or read format metadata in the container to figure out what you're _actually_ dealing with.
I don't like sniffing any more than the next guy, but the work needed to properly MIME label a modern media format (with the whole container and multiple streams thing) is ... excessive. I doubt anyone's going to do it, so we're really talking about just labeling the container format, right?
-Boris
