Re: [tlug] Firefox 3.0.1 doesn't respect <meta http-equiv="content-type">

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Curt Sampson writes:
>  > On 2008-09-11 10:44 +0900 (Thu), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>  > 
>  > >  > It is. Try these on for size:
>  > >  > 
>  > >  >     <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="image/jpeg" />
>  > >  >     <meta http-equiv="Content-encoding" content="gzip" />
>  > >  >     <meta http-equiv="Content-length" content="0" />
>  > > 
>  > > And your point might be?
>  > 
>  > Semantically, these are nonsense. They can only exist if they are
>  > incorrect. Now that's the way to make a specification!
>
> Yup, they're nonsense.  And they would be just as nonsensical if the
> server sent them ... which is precisely what happened to me to start
> this thread (for a different value of "nonsense").

What I presume Curt is saying is that adding descriptive metadata 
necessary to reliably read the contents of a file, in an encoding 
specific to the file, is inherently stupid because you have to already 
have this information in order to read the encoded metadata.  Conversely 
if you don't have this information you can't guarantee that your are 
correctly reading it from the file.

Edward