[whatwg] Re: Is this introducing incompatibilities with future W3C work

[Jim Ley]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 01:21:59 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > if I'm wrong (and I probably am) then I would oppose it yes, and would
> > suggest application/prs.hixie.html (and a +xml one for the XML version)
> > for development and testing yes.
> 
> Well that's not going to happen... For one it wouldn't degrade gracefully.

Oh, does graceful degradation matter whilst we're developing it, it's
perfectly possible to get IE6 to render a document sent as that as if
it had been sent as text/html - I would hope the other browsers have
similar extension mechanisms for enabling new mime-types to be
identified with some tweaking.   After all no-one's going to be
shipping release code during this development phase.

> Oh you are complaining that when a document sent using one of the three
> default Apache Content-Type headers with content that violates those
> headers by including illegal bytes, Mozilla (and Opera) attempt to detect
> the content to see if it is actually binary data instead of displaying
> (what is guarenteed to be) garbage?

No, the media types one, which I can't easily find but was on
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ at the previous release, it
wasn't just the above feature.
Ah, here we are:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=7GUgc.115%24_o3.1200%40bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net

" Firefox 0.8 and Moz 1.7b both have this fixed.  The browser sniffs the 
file and offers to download it and open it in yourt default media player."

The text/plain document in question contains no invalid characters

Jim.