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Bug 12456 - On some web-hostings authors cannot use/manage real HTTP headers. So there must be an opportunity to point out some more "http-equiv" document properties: media (content-)type - application/xhtml+xml, 'cache-control', perhaps 'last-modified' and 'expires'
Summary: On some web-hostings authors cannot use/manage real HTTP headers. So there mu...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-04-08 17:04 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-04 05:01 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-04-08 17:04:31 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#table-http-equiv

Comment:
On some web-hostings authors cannot use/manage real HTTP headers. So there
must be an opportunity to point out some more "http-equiv" document
properties: media (content-)type - application/xhtml+xml, 'cache-control',
perhaps 'last-modified' and 'expires'.

Posted from: 188.244.38.2
User agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.0; U; ru) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01
Comment 1 Kornel Lesinski 2011-04-08 22:51:08 UTC 
Content-Type change via http-equiv is not possible in current browsers, but there are text/html pages in the wild that have application/xhtml+xml in http-equiv, so adding support for this could break those pages.

I'm also wary of introducing in-document way of declaring "XHTMLness", especially one that would result in text/html interpretation in some browsers. It may be confusing like XHTML/1.0 DOCTYPEs were and cause some authors to produce text/html documents that fail in XML mode.

I think current HTML5 state is better - there's only one way to enable XHTML and it's quite clear, even if not most convenient on shared hosting.


Cache-related headers in response body won't be seen by HTTP proxies, which would make caching less effective or inconsistent. Widespread use of http-equiv headers would force proxies to parse HTML, and that would be significant and unfortunate change in the HTTP protocol.

In my experience more and more hostings support .htaccess files, so I think that's a better direction, and hosts may support setting of HTTP headers sooner and with lower cost than it takes to change all HTTP agents support http-equiv.
Comment 2 Henri Sivonen 2011-04-11 06:21:37 UTC 
FWIW, this feature got removed by accident from Firefox 4 at first. Then it was discovered that re-adding it was unexpectedly hard, so the feature was knowingly dropped and the remaining dead code removed for Firefox 5.

Note that Safari has managed to retain users for years without this feature.

I think this bug should be WONTFIX.
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-05-26 22:17:33 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: see comment 2
Comment 4 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:01:58 UTC 
mass-moved component to LC1