sucky mozilla thing.

[waider]

Phrases like "Let's keep knowledge of the content-type header out of the loader ok?" are hugely unhelpful in the context of the end-user. It's like saying, "Let's maintain ideological code purity at the expense of the user experience, okay?".

May I refer you to an appropriate Jerkcity cartoon, particularly the final frame.

Comments

[nothings.livejournal.com]

What the hell is an end-user doing reading bug comment #14 on bug #67940?

Or if you meant that the attitude shown in that comment reflects an anti-user-friendly attitude, I think the author just meant "that is not the right place to put it", not "this bug should not be fixed".

Nevermind that mime types are a total fuckup in the first place.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Nevermind that mime types are a total fuckup in the first place.

What exactly do you mean? What would you replace them with?

[nothings.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't say that mime types per se are bad; it's that how mime types are used in HTTP that is bad.

Mime type usage in http is designed so that for a file to be semantically comprehended by the client that retrieves it, its type must be recognized by both server and client, as opposed to something like ftp, where it only need be recognized by the client.

This is perhaps useful in the case where the "file" being transmitted isn't properly a file--it's CGI output or something, so the client has no way to determine its type correctly--but in the cases where http is being used like ftp, to transmit files, it just adds a useless point of failure--if the server doesn't recognize the file type, it transmits it as text/plain and corrupts it. It introduces misconfiguration errors like the html example that provoked waider. etc. etc.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yes, good point. That drives me bugfuck. Default should be application/octet-stream, at least.

Ideally, it'd be nice if the client had something like UNIX's file application to recognize the file and deal with it appropriately.

[waider.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what this bug is about - the fact that some servers spit out the wrong MIME type, and while, say, Internet Explorer or even older versions of Netscape use the registry or the mime.types file to correct in the case of application/octet-stream, current versions of Mozilla simply give up and claim ignorance of, for example, HTML just because it's presented as an octet-stream.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

One thing i've noticed with Mozilla (and Firebird) is that it seems to want to save application/octet-stream stuff with an extra suffix that it picks up seemingly at random; my copy of Firebird wants to save .exe files as .swf (so they end up as filename.exe.swf), and on the boy's computer, Mozilla wants to save them as .ace. I could file a bug report on this... but i expect they're already working on it.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Internet Explorer and several other Microsoft things used do that a few years back. They corrected it. See previous reference to Jerkcity.

It's a crying shame (or perhaps an event worth noting) to have to point at Microsoft as an example of how to do it right.