[whatwg] <video> application/octet-stream
Boris Zbarsky
bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Wed Jul 21 11:10:54 PDT 2010
On 7/21/10 9:10 AM, Nils Dagsson Moskopp wrote:
> While the robustness principle is indeed a good start, this is a
> situation where we are mostly starting with a clean slate.
Maciej's point was that Safari doesn't feel like it's starting with a
clean slate.
> Lets not forget that the broken situation is one that is not commonly
> encountered with<video>, only with distinct proprietary plugins.
> Whoever can change the markup on the web site on this level, will, in
> most cases, be able to change the MIME type as well (adding one line
> to .htaccess for each type is not hard)
I believe this claim is false. There are plenty of people who can
change the HTML but not the web server configuration, even on a
per-directory basis....
> so this is a minimal burden
> on site authors (or none at all for shared hosting, as soon as default
> MIME mapping for such media types has trickled into web server
> defaults).
You mean 7-8 years from now? For example, Apache 2 has been out since
2002, and yet Apache 1 is still fairly widely used...
> So, carrying this inconsistency over to a standards-based world would
> make MIME types essentially useless for media content, necessitating a
> partial download and sniffing code, like unixoid FILE(1).
Yep; we're already there. The MIME type typically lists the container
format only and then you have to either sniff or read format metadata in
the container to figure out what you're _actually_ dealing with.
I don't like sniffing any more than the next guy, but the work needed to
properly MIME label a modern media format (with the whole container and
multiple streams thing) is ... excessive. I doubt anyone's going to do
it, so we're really talking about just labeling the container format, right?
-Boris
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