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

[Simon Pieters]

On Thu, 20 May 2010 11:55:01 +0200, Robert O'Callahan  
<robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:

> 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 bug report was about application/octet-stream *with parameters*, e.g.  
application/octet-stream; codecs="theora, vorbis". The spec had the  
requirement about application/octet-stream before that bug report.


> 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


-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software