[whatwg] Style sheet loading and parsing (over HTTP)

[Jon Barnett]

>
>      "An agent MUST NOT ignore or override authoritative metadata
>
without the consent of the party employing the agent."
>
> is a good thing, but please don't claim by having this default to true
> constitutes consent.
>
> Best regards, Julian


Prompting a user for any sort of consent would be useless and confusing,
because users don't know what MIME types are.  Even a dialog that says "This
document claims to be plain text, but looks like a hypertext document.  Do
you want to render it as a hypertext document?"  would be useless and
confusing because, frankly, users don't know the difference between plain
text, web pages, and Microsoft Word.

So, if you interpret that "consent" to mean some sort of explicit
interaction by the user after the User Agent is installed, then that clause
is impossible to satisfy in any useful way.  For the purpose of this
discussion and this section of HTML5, "consent" should be defined as Anne
said - by using a browser, you consent to it being useful. But there's an
option to make it less useful if you want.

Logging Content-type discrepencies in an error console should be enough to
satisfy the other requirement in section 4.

I understand your concern.  You want authors to correct mistakes in their
code (and server configurations) to comply with standards.  Authors should
be encouraged to do so, but only in ways that are not detrimental to end
users.  End users don't make a good middle man for telling an author when
his code doesn't agree with a spec.  End users tend to blame the browser
first.

-- 
Jon Barnett
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