On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Ashley Sheridan <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 2010-08-06 at 12:43 -0700, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: >> Do browsers supply a file extension for un-extensioned files based on >> the mimetype? I didn't think they did. A file without an extension >> confuses most people. > > It would confused Windows users mostly, who have no way to detect a file type > that has no extension. Linux and Mac users will generally be in a better > position.
That would be "most users". ^_^ >>> "Virtually always" seems like an overstatement based on how often I >>> see people extract sound tracks from Youtube videos (and how I often I >>> see people don't in part due to them only having a dumb one-off >>> Flash-based video player). Or try to sequence playing of arbitrary >>> songs from Youtube with multiple browser windows + manual play/pausing >>> hackery. Or other things that would be trivial with their usual media >>> player. >> >> You're running with a very non-representative crowd if those are the >> sorts of things your friends do. > > I'm not sure you can say that's non-representative without supplying some > sort of backup evidence. The very fact that people do this sort of thing > should be enough for a use-case. As it is though, despite having issues with > Flash video on Linux (my platform of choice) I would prefer it as a backup > in-case I didn't have the right codecs installed. This will likely apply more > to Windows users though, as a default Windows install (I'm basing this on XP, > which is still extremely popular and is the latest version of Windows with > which I'm very familiar) doesn't come with a huge range of codecs. Oh, I don't doubt the use-case. That case is served quite well right now, as all browsers expose a "Save As..." option in the video context menu. I'm disputing that it's the *common* case, such that it needs to be explicitly catered to. >>> And as SVG is not universally supported, what if I want to offer some >>> logos/icons/images as both (gzipped) SVG and PNG? >> >> SVG is in the process of being universally supported right now. Once >> IE9 is out, every modern browser will support it. > > There's still a huge amount of XP users about (going by various statistics > sites) which won't ever support IE9. Also, XP SP3 is supported until at least > 2014, so there's likely a whole slew of Windows machines that will never see > IE9. I think it's fairly safe to say that the majority of these will be > business machines, and many corporate environments won't allow extraneous > software, such as an alternative browser, to be installed. As such, it's back > to Flash again as a default fallback, as that is the only thing that can be > almost guaranteed in that sort of environment. Like I said just after this section of my email, you'll be able to serve SVG long before you'll be able to serve a generic media container with fallback ability. If a user is stuck with an outdated browser that won't show SVG, *they're stuck with an outdated browser*. Even if we introduced something that will automatically fallback from SVG to PNG, IE6-8 will still fail to show anything. ~TJ
