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Re: well-formedness error


On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 23:22:01 -0400, Ryan Tomayko <rtomayko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You can't have that content-type on statically served web pages. You just can't. 

Well, in fact, you can. There is more than one way of adding new
media-type to extension mappings in apache.

It doesn't matter what Apache offers if the user doesn't have the necessary rights, or if Apache isn't configured to let .htaccess override settings
in httpd.conf. There are thousands of these users only in Norway. What do we do about them?

I'll take the liberty of suggesting that you may have meant to say
that for some percentage of the environments we hope to target that it
is hard or impossible to create new media-type to extension mappings.

I didn't mean it's impossible for everyone, but the ones I'm talking about; people that have free hosting bundled with their internet service has only the possibility to serve content from static HTML pages and has absolutely no rights or ways to configure how the server should serve their content. Everything is static and locked-in. If '.xml' is mapped to 'Content-Type: text/xml', there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. Nothing.

That is something that needs to be considered but maybe the 80/20 rule
can make the decision here?

Maybe. I hope so, but I know that in Norway, these users can't be excluded. We have free hosting services in Norway that doesn't have as much restrictions, but the majority of services do. And it's of course the majority of services that are being used. So I'm pretty confident that the 80/20 rule applies here.

Does anyone have even a vague idea of what percentage of environments
have this issue? Is it close to 20%? 50%? Until we have a guess at
that I'm not sure this thread can result in anything constructive.

I can maybe do some research here in Norway, but I'm pretty sure already what the results will be.

Doesn't this line of thinking imply that the current set of media-type
to extension mappings are fixed and can no longer be extended?

Yup. But that's how it works. These free web hosting services aren't the first one to upgrade when a new version of their web server arrives (usually Apache or IIS), so how else should the media-type/extension mapping be extended?

Maybe it's just me but that seems like a pretty heavy constraint.
Wouldn't that effectively stop the WG from defining a new media type
period?

New versions of web server software bundles in new media-types, I'm sure. But old software keeps old no matter what any WG does.

If this is the case--that a new media type cannot be defined--then it
should be stated somewhere as one of the bounds the WG needs to work
within.

Seeing that all web servers I've ever laid my hands on serve '.html' files as 'text/html' without any charset information, I think these bounds and constraints are pretty meaningless.

It would seem an odd constraint for a WG defining a new media type to
not be able to formally define a new media type.

I agree. But for old web server software, that is the reality. I guess if enough users are interested in having a media type defined, they will nag their hosting service to define it, but if not enough users are interested, nothing will be done.

--
Asbjørn Ulsberg         -=|=-        asbjornu@xxxxxxxxxxx
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»