[whatwg] [mimesniff] Sniffing archives

[Adam Barth]

These are supported in Chrome.  That's what causes the download.  From
your comment, it's not clear to me if you are correctly reverse
engineering existing user agents.  The techniques we used to create
this list originally are quite sophisticated and involved a massive
amount of data [1].  It would be a shame if you destroyed that work
because you didn't understand it.

Adam

[1] http://www.adambarth.com/papers/2009/barth-caballero-song.pdf


On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Gordon P. Hemsley <gphemsley at gmail.com> wrote:
> To be clear, I'm asking this because I would like to remove the
> sniffing of archive types from the mimesniff spec if there aren't any
> valid usecases.
>
> On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Gordon P. Hemsley <gphemsley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The mimesniff spec currently includes signatures for ZIP, gzip, and
>> RAR archive formats. However, no major browser seems to support them
>> natively (they all prompt for download), and it's not clear whether
>> the type detection is a product of the browser code or the OS, or
>> whether it is used beyond choosing an appropriate file extension for
>> the download.
>>
>> Are there any valid usecases for explicitly sniffing archive formats
>> instead of letting them default to application/octet-stream like other
>> binary files would? Note that Henri Sivonen has previously raised the
>> issue that ZIP-based formats (like office suite documents), for
>> example, would be misleadingly sniffed as ZIP files, and there is no
>> easy way around that.
>>
>> --
>> Gordon P. Hemsley
>> me at gphemsley.org
>> http://gphemsley.org/ • http://gphemsley.org/blog/
>
>
>
> --
> Gordon P. Hemsley
> me at gphemsley.org
> http://gphemsley.org/ • http://gphemsley.org/blog/