[whatwg] Video with MIME type application/octet-stream

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 8/31/10 9:57 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>> One obvious benefit is that videos with the wrong type will not work,
>> and hence videos will be sent with the right type.
>>
>> If the question is what the benefits of that are, one is that the
>> "view video in new window" context menu option actually works.
>
> If you sniff you can sniff there too.

Not really, since it's just rendering in a toplevel browser window.  Or 
rather... one could, but sniffing or not depending on something other 
than the state of the url bar and the server response in toplevel 
browser windows is extremely poor UI.

>> Another benefit is that you can send someone the link to the video,
>> instead of the embedding page, and it will work.
>
> If you sniff you can sniff there too. (Unless that user uses a
> competitor's browser, but that would be an incentive to encourage that
> user to use the sniffing browser.)

You can't sniff in a toplevel browser window.  Not the same way that 
people are sniffing in <video>.  It would break the web.

>> Another is that when you save the video to disk the browser will fix
>> up the extension correctly, if needed.
>
> If you sniff you can fix it up correctly too.

Perhaps...  It involves some interesting special-casing of code that's 
totally unrelated to <video>, but could be done.

-Boris