On 6/14/10, Ethan Grammatikidis <eeke...@fastmail.fm> wrote: > > On 14 Jun 2010, at 22:35, Ilya Ilembitov wrote: >> >> So, here is my question. If we take only modern and active projects, >> how standard are they? Suppose, we have a browser engine that >> implements only the current standards (OK, may be some legacy >> standards, but no IE or other tweaks), will we still be able to use >> 95% of the web? > > Probably, but why? There's nothing suckless at all about the standards > coming out of the w3c. I don't know much about rendering html but I > recently made a web server, and while I started out with the noble > intent of supporting standards, before I was done I just had to > declare http 1.1 schizophrenic and delusional! > > Consider this: Out of web browser and web server, which one has to > examine the data in order to render it, and which one is just reading > it from the disk and dumping it down a pipe? Which one's resources are > at a premium, and which is mostly idling between fetching web pages? > With those two questions in mind, can someone please tell me what the > w3c were collectively smoking when they made content-type mandatory in > http 1.1? If that isn't enough argument, it's actually impossible to > set content-type correctly from file extension. No-one really tries > and I very much doubt they ever did, but that didn't stop the w3c from > making it mandatory. Idiots. setfattr(1). File extensions are just a historical misunderstanding (where people confused presentation with semantics). IMO they should mostly be used to give unique names to binaries, sources and configuration files with a similiar base name. > "Schizophrenic" actually refers to a less serious problem, but still a > bizarre one. Dates are provided in headers to guide caching, very > useful in itself but the date format is about as long-winded as it can > get and it's US-localised too. With that in mind, why are chunk length > values for chunked encoding given in hex? That's not even consistent > with the length value of content-length, which is decimal. And what > titan amongst geniuses decided it was appropriate to apply chunked > encoding to the http headers? Granted, decimal vs hex inconsistency is plain weird. But nobody is forcing you (as a httpd implementor) to actually use (chunked) trailing headers, though it´s a different story for clients.
-- kv, - Bjartur