[whatwg] [mimesniff] Sniffing archives

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Tue Dec 4 10:32:47 PST 2012


On Tue, 4 Dec 2012, Gordon P. Hemsley wrote:
>
> To be more specific:
> 
> (1) Safari doesn't appear to prompt the user for any downloads. It
> just automatically downloads any file it can't handle.
> (2) If you allow Safari to open "safe" files that it downloads, ZIP
> appears to be one of them. Gzip and RAR, however, do not.
> 
> So this isn't the most convincing argument.

In particular, it doesn't seem like this needs to be defined in the MIME 
sniff spec. There's no harm in the browser sniffing more non-scripted 
types than the spec says, if it's just for labeling or handling at the OS 
level. It's when one browser handles something as completely safe and 
another handles something as live, or when a browser displays a file 
differently than another browser, that there's a problem, really.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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