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

[And Clover]

On 09/07/2010 03:56 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:

> P.S. Sniffing is harder that you seem to think. It really is...

Quite. It surprises and saddens me that anyone wants to argue for *more* 
sniffing, and even enshrining it in a web standard.

Sniffing is a perpetual disaster that, after several security-sensitive 
problems, web browsers have been moving to deprecate/mitigate. If 
browsers want to guess types when no Content-Type is specified(*) then 
fine, but there is no good reason to ignore an explicitly-set type. I 
don't want my `application/octet-stream` file download service to be 
repurposeable as a video player for some other party!

For reasons already argued about here, you will never make the results 
of content-sniffing reliable, so why bother to standardise it? A 
standardised unreliable feature is no better than an unstandardised one.

The typing mechanism of the web (and more) is Content-Type, period. 
There should be no confusion of this with officially-endorsed sniffing. 
That it is 'hard' for web authors to ensure the correct Content-Types 
are set is:

* not W3/WHATWG's problem. If web servers make adding Content-Type 
information hard, then web servers need to be updated to make it easier;

* not really true, at least for Apache which can allow AddType et al in 
the .htaccess files that low-end shared hosts use. This may not be 
widely-known or practised, but that doesn't really merit changing the 
standards for everyone else to cope with.

(*: or, the traditional reason for sniffing, `text/plain`, due to Apache 
inappropriately sending this type for unknown files by default, bug 
13986. That doesn't seem to apply here.)

-- 
And Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/