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

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

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.
 > ...

Sounds good to me.

In general, defining certain behaviors normatively is a good thing, but 
it doesn't need to be all-or-nothing. Also, throwing around MUSTs 
frequently doesn't help in practice; what's more important is to 
*convince* the reader that doing something is the right thing. More inline.

For instance, as Larry mentioned, (1) missing Content-Type, (2) 
mislabeled Content-Type and (3) invalid Content-Type (multiple headers) 
are distinct cases with different underlying reasons, so requiring the 
same behavior may not always be the best approach. So having different 
sections define this, and allowing people to pick the right pieces might 
be a good idea here.

Best regards, Julian