[whatwg] Appcache feedback (various threads)

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:02:01 +0200, Patrick Mueller  
<pmuellr at muellerware.org> wrote:
> On 8/12/10 6:29 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> XML would be much too complex for what is needed. We could possibly
>>> remove the media type check and resort to using the "CACHE MANIFEST"
>>> identifier (i.e. "sniffing"), but the HTTP gods will get angry.
>>
>> Yeah, that's pretty much the way it is.
>
> Although I haven't personally had a problem dealing with the  
> content-type requirement, I have heard from at least one other colleague  
> who did; their server was harder to configure.
>
> I had assumed the reason for having the specific text/cache-manifest  
> content type was to force people to "opt-in" to support, instead of  
> being able to just read a random URL and having it interpreted, perhaps  
> maliciously, as a manifest.
>
> If that's not a concern, then I'd like to understand the ramifications  
> of getting the HTTP angry gods angry by ignoring the content-type.

In HTTP (starting HTTP/1.0), entity bodies are identified by the  
Content-Type header, not by themselves. We violate that for a number of  
scenarios, but we try to stay clear of it in new, until such time comes  
that we give up completely on Content-Type. It's a compromise.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/