[whatwg] [mimesniff] Review requested on MIME Sniffing Standard

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2012, Gordon P. Hemsley wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 6:08 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Mon, 12 Nov 2012, Gordon P. Hemsley wrote:
> >> But if everyone vows to just wait for 512 bytes (or EOF), then that's 
> >> fine with me.
> >
> > I don't think we should require tools to wait for 512 bytes. This is 
> > an area where if we have the requirement, some user agents are just 
> > going to have a timeout anyway and ignore the spec; we gain nothing by 
> > making it non-conforming to have a timeout.
> 
> I'm inclined to agree with you, but I'm curious what other implementers 
> have to say on the issue.
> 
> >> > What are the use cases for ‘Sniffing archives specifically’?
> >>
> >> No idea. I only included it for completeness.
> >
> > Please don't spec things for completeness without use cases. :-)
> 
> In that case, I need to know which you think you might want for HTML and 
> which you know you won't. (I don't know of any other specs reliant on 
> mimesniff.)

We definitely need (and are using) the generic sniffer, sniffing for 
images specifically, and the rules for text vs binary.

We may one day need a set of rules to sniff for a media resource (e.g. 
audio/wave vs video/webm), but whether we'll need this is as yet unclear 
(some browser vendors want to sniff, others don't).

CSS might need a font sniffer for @font-face, I don't know.

That's it, as far as I know.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'