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March 17, 2005
Encoding & Layering Fun
I saw an interesting talk by Sam Ruby which was ostensibly about not using HTTP for things which it was not intended. The good stuff starts around slide 33. The thing that I found most interesting was his discussion about how layering of encodings can end up being a mess. In particular, the idea that (according to the standards) the HTTP Content-Type declaration is impossible to override from inside the document seems crazy.
Posted by dmose at March 17, 2005 4:22 PM
Comments
Why? By the time you've accessed any information in the document, you've already started some sort of handling process that presumably depends on the, uh, type of content in it.
Posted by: choess at March 17, 2005 11:32 PM
Yep, *very* interesting - and scary - set of slides. Thanks for the link!
Posted by: Daniel Glazman at March 18, 2005 12:11 AM
DMose!
(If not, PLEASE forward to him :) )
Son of a gun! I was perusing my notebook under "search engines" and saw DMOZ. I just had to look further. Ahhh, hon, you've obviously done well for yourself! Couldn't possibly have happened to a nicer guy. You've come a long way from the Electrical Parade, huh? Remember when I gave you a little fireman, 'cause you were the guy who always fixed my computer issues?
Love to hear from you!
Dottie
Posted by: Dottie Tannatt (Glander) at March 27, 2005 10:41 AM
It may seems crazy at first that the value in the headers overrides what is in the document, but the logic behind is that the document is more static than the headers. The web server can take a document in x encoding and reencode in y encoding. He has the final power about what representation will be sent.
But this is only valid when the server knows what encoding the document is in, and doesn't try to set an Encoding value when in fact he has no idea and control on what is inside the docs. Which is the default setting of apache 2 (document creators should use specific multiple document extension values to convey that info, but have no idea about it truly).
Posted by: Jean-Marc Desperrier at June 16, 2005 11:48 PM