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

[David Singer]

On Sep 7, 2010, at 2:51 , And Clover wrote:

> 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.

Yes.  We should be striving for a world in which as little sniffing as possible happens (and is needed).  Basically, we have the problem because of mis-configured or (from the author's point of view) unconfigurable web servers.  

So I wonder if
* the presence of a <source> element with a "type" attribute should be believed (at least for the purposes of dispatch and 'canplay' decisions)? If the author of the page got it wrong or lied, surely they can accept (and deal with) the consequences?
* whether we should only really sniff the two types in HTTP headers that tend to get used as fallbacks (application/octet-stream and text/plain)?  Though I note that I have sometimes *wanted* a file displayed as text (and not interpreted) and been defeated by sniffing (though not as often as watching binary dumped on my screen as if it were text).



David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.