So someone pointed out this IEBlog entry for me, and I find it so hilarious I felt a need to share the fun. See the “MIME-Handling: Sniffing Opt-Out” paragraph towards the end.
Apparently Internet Explorer 7 and earlier just don’t care much for the Content-Type: header that servers reply, but they instead scan the body and guess what type it is. Thus “knowing better” than the content provider what content it truly is.
So in IE8 they’re (according to that blog entry) introducing a new attribute to the Content-Type header. If the site also sets “authoritative=true” it means it really means the type and the browser will then actually believe the site. I can’t stop giggling.
And yeah, some of the other craziness on that page is also good reading and they truly make you wonder what they are smoking during their brain storm meetings.
I won’t be joining the attempted world record of Firefox downloads on the release day June 17th 2008 since I dist-upgraded my Debian unstable just a few days ago and I got my Firef… eh Iceweasel version 3 then.
Of course, others have also noted that Firefox will miss a few Linux users downloading that version as Linux users all over will prefer to get it using their distros’ ordinary means of getting packages and updates…
I thought I’d just mention Patrik Wallström’s interesting project named Creeper. He basically offers a URL for an image to display on the site you run/admin, and then his server checks which IP addresses that gets the image and then cross-checks those addresses against a list of IP ranges of known swedish organizations, government agencies, political party headquarters and more.
An ingenious way to get some degree of knowledge about who looks at what and when. At least if a large enough amount of people display the Creeper icon:
Ok, so we’re now officially over the hill. HTML4 was as good as we could make HTML, and the proof of this is the mighty insane and crazy mess W3C shows in their HTML 5 draft from January 22nd 2008.
I mean, you can possibly (I mean if you hold on to your chair hard and really really try to extend your mind and be open) show sympathy and understanding for far-fetched stuff like “ping” and “prefetch” (or for that matter “author” and “contact”), but when they come to editing, drag-and-drop and how to deal with undo they certainly lost me. My favorite chapter in the draft is however this:
It takes a while just to suck up the concept of a HTML draft discussing broadcasting data. Over bluetooth. Man, these guys must have the best meetings!
