What is "the type of X" if X doesn't have a declared type?

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Masinter 
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 4:27 PM
To: 'John Kemp'
Subject: 

I've postponed ACTION-386 (which was to do a more thorough
in-depth review of the "sniffing" document), but I wonder if
it might be possible have a discussion about a very small
piece of it.

The mime sniff document, many W3C recommendations, and
many discussions, including the recent traffic in
public-html@w3.org around re-registration of the
text/html MIME type all seem to take the form of

"Can I serve an X document as Y"

"How can I 'sniff' that an X document served as Y
  really is an X."

These discussions seem to assume that the notion of
"an X document" (an HTML 5 document, an XHTML2 document)
is meaningful and well-formed and decidable without
any additional contextual information. 

But in the case of "polyglot" documents, we have something
that is simultaneously "an X document" and "a Y document",
or is either one or the other. 

I'd like to see if we could get some agreement on
a way to rephrase those statements and questions.

Do you think that's worth discussing at the F2F?

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2010 18:37:38 UTC