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

Robert O'Callahan robert at ocallahan.org
Thu May 20 02:55:01 PDT 2010


I just became aware that application/octet-stream is excluded from being a
type "the user agent knows it cannot render".
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#a-type-that-the-user-agent-knows-it-cannot-render
Apparently this was done in response to a bug report:
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7977
Neither the bug report nor the editor's response give any indication why
this change was made.

This change means files served with application/octet-stream will make it
all the way to the step "If the media
data<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#media-data>can
be fetched but is found by inspection to be in an unsupported format
...", so implementations have to add support for binary sniffing for all the
types they support. We didn't need this before in Gecko. What was the
motivation for adding this implementation requirement?

Thanks,
Rob
-- 
"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are
healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his
own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." [Isaiah
53:5-6]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20100520/397788db/attachment-0002.htm>


More information about the whatwg mailing list