Re: comments on draft-abarth-mime-sniff-03

[Ian Hickson <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 22 Jan 2010, Adam Barth wrote:
>
> At a higher level, what do folks think about re-writing the draft in a 
> more informative style instead of a normative style?  A bunch of Larry's 
> points boil down to the strengths of the normative requirements and the 
> scope of the affected user agents.  I certainly have no wish to ram 
> sniffing down anyone's throats.  I'd rather provide this document as a 
> reference for folks who feel compelled to do content sniffing but who 
> don't want to invest the year and a half of research that my colleagues 
> and I invested to arrive at this algorithm.

I think all user agents should be required to behave the same, so that 
users and content creators can interchange them at will, leading to a 
healthier competitive landscape. To this end, I think the spec should be 
normative with no optional behaviour.

I'm ok with allowing the sniffing to be skipped altogether, since that is 
equivalent to not implementing the spec. However, I'm not especially happy 
about allowing that, and I certainly do not think we should water down the 
requirements any more than that, _especially_ not on purely theoretical 
grounds.


> All that is a long-winded way of saying that these things are in the 
> draft for a reason.  The sniffing algorithm is highly constrained by 
> reality.  Looking for philosophical purity in content sniffing is like 
> trying to find a Newtonian explanation of Brownian motion.

Indeed.

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