On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:51:55 +0200, And Clover <and...@doxdesk.com> wrote:
On 09/07/2010 03:56 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
P.S. Sniffing is harder that you seem to think. It really is...
Quite. It surprises and saddens me that anyone wants to argue for *more*
sniffing, and even enshrining it in a web standard.
IE9, Safari and Chrome ignore Content-Type in a <video> context and rely
on sniffing. If you want Content-Type to be respected, convince the
developers of those 3 browsers to change. If not, it's quite inevitable
that Opera and Firefox will eventually have to follow.
Sniffing is a perpetual disaster that, after several security-sensitive
problems, web browsers have been moving to deprecate/mitigate.
For reasons already argued about here, you will never make the results
of content-sniffing reliable, so why bother to standardise it? A
standardised unreliable feature is no better than an unstandardised one.
Unless all browsers agree to respect Content-Type, the next best thing is
to agree on the same sniffing. Why would leaving it undefined be better?
The typing mechanism of the web (and more) is Content-Type, period.
Only in theory. In practice, Content-Type is an unreliable indicator of
the type of a resource. Sniffing is already part of the web architecture,
with all its problems.
(*: or, the traditional reason for sniffing, `text/plain`, due to Apache
inappropriately sending this type for unknown files by default, bug
13986. That doesn't seem to apply here.)
It hasn't been explicitly stated, but I assume that the only cases where
sniffing for video formats would be employed would be for missing
Content-Type, text/plain and application/octet-stream.
--
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software
