On 07/28/2014 06:34, Gordon P. Hemsley wrote:
Sorry for the delay in responding. Your message fell through the
cracks in my e-mail filters.
On 07/17/2014 08:26 AM, duanyao wrote:
Hi,
My first question is about a rule in MIME Sniffing specification
(http://mimesniff.spec.whatwg.org):
5.1 Interpreting the resource metadata
...
If the resource is retrieved directly from the file system, set
supplied-type to the MIME type
provided by the file system.
As far as I know, no main-stream file systems record MIME type for
files. Does the spec actually want to say "provided by the operating
system" or
"provided by the file name extension"?
Yeah, you've hit a known (though apparently unrecorded) bug in the
spec, originally pointed out to me by Boris Zbarsky via IRC many
months ago. The intent here is basically just "whatever the computer
says it is"—whether that be via the file system, the operating system,
or whatever, and whether it uses magic bytes, file extensions, or
whatever.
In other words, feel free to read that as "the correct behavior is
undefined/unknown" at this point.
Thanks for the explanation.
Recently, file: protocol becomes more and more important due to the
popularity of packaged web applications, including PhoneGap app, Chrome
app, Firefox OS app, Window 8 HTML app, etc (not all of them use file:
protocol directly, but underlying mechanisms are similar).
So If we can't specify a interoperable way to determine a local file's
mime type, porting of packaged web applications can be problematic in
some situations (actually my team already hit this).
I know that currently there is no standard way to determine a local
file's mime type, this may be one of the reason that mimesniff spec has
not defined a behavior here.
I'd like to propose a simple way to resolve this problem:
For mime types that has already been standardized by IANA and used in
web standards, determine a local file's supplied-type according to its
file extension.
This list could include htm, html, xhtml, xml, svg, css, js, ipeg, ipg,
png, mp4, webm, woff, etc. Otherwise, UAs can determine supplied-type by
any means.
I think this rule should resolve most of the interoperability problems,
and largely maintain compatibility with current UAs' implementations.
My second question is: does above rule apply equally to both fetching
static resources (top level, iframe, img, etc) and XMLHttpRequest?
It seems all browsers try to figure out actual type for local static
resources, so that .htm and .xhtml files are rendered as HTML and
XHTML respectively,
so far so good.
But when it comes to XHR, things are different.
Firefox(31) set Content-Type header to 'application/xml' for local
files of any type; and if setting xhr.responseType = 'document',
response is parsed as XML;
also if setting xhr.responseType = 'blob', blob.type is always
'application/xml'. This is significantly diverse from static fetching
behavior.
Chromium(34) set Content-Type header to null for local files of any
type; but if setting xhr.responseType = 'document', response is
parsed according to its actual type,
i.e. .htm as HTML and .xhtml as XHTML; and if setting
xhr.responseType = 'blob', blob.type is the file's actual type, i.e.
'text/html' for .htm and 'application/xhtml+xml'
for .xhtml. This is similar to static fetching behavior, however
Content-Type header is missing.
I think rule 5.1 should be applied to both static fetching and XHR
consistently. Browsers should set Content-Type header to local files'
actual type for XHR, and interpret
them accordingly. But firefox developers think this would break some
existing codes that already rely on firefox's behavior
(see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1037762).
What do you think?
Regards,
Duan Yao.
Anne's the person to ask about XHR first, I think. I don't want to
make any judgements or claims until I hear his view on the situation.
That being said, I created the Contexts wiki article [1] and began
splitting up the mimesniff spec according to contexts [2] in an effort
to clarify this situation and make sure that all bases were covered.
It's still a work in progress, awaiting feedback from implementers and
other spec writers.
I agree that there's a hole in how mimesniff, XHR, and Contexts
intersect, and I'll be happy to update mimesniff to fill it, if that's
determined to be the best course of action.
HTH,
Gordon
[1] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Contexts
[2] http://mimesniff.spec.whatwg.org/#context-specific-sniffing
I note that in the Contexts wiki article, "connection" context (which
XHR belongs to) has no sniffing algorithm specified.
Does this mean UA should not sniff in case of XHR, or just mean the
algorithm has not been specified yet?
Personally I'd like to have "connection" context use same algorithm as
"browsing" context, because client js codes aren't always
sure about the mime types sent via XHR, much like "browsing" context.
