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

Boris Zbarsky bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Wed Sep 1 07:38:45 PDT 2010


On 9/1/10 9:13 AM, Brian Campbell wrote:
> It seems that periodically, web standards bodies decide "this time, if we're strict, people will just get the content right or it won't work" (such as XHTML with XML parsing rules), and invariably, people manage to screw it up anyhow. Sure, when the author tests their page the first time it's fine, but a mistaken lack of quoting in a comments field breaks the whole page. This causes people to migrate to the browsers or technologies that are less strict, and actually show the user what they want to see, rather than just breaking due to something out of the user's control.

I hasn't actually happened for MIME types in toplevel documents (modulo 
the one known workaround for a common server issue with text/plain).  By 
and large, browsers don't sniff toplevel browsing contexts, and the one 
browser that does has been losing market share.

-Boris



More information about the whatwg mailing list