[webkit-dev] Harmonizing content sniffing

[Adam Barth]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> wrote:
> I believe earlier you proposed moving the sniffing into the WebKit project.

Yes.

> One way to start the ball rolling is to file a bug at bugreport.apple.com
> with these suggested changes and cite the WebKit context in that bug report.
> If you do that, please give me the bug number so I can push the changes here
> within Apple.

I can do that if you like, or I can implement a content sniffing
algorithm in WebKit itself.  I think moving the algorithm into WebKit
proper has a couple benefits:

1) All the ports can use exactly the same algorithm, increasing
compatibility between different ports.
2) Having algorithm be open-source helps folks who are trying to
design filters for their web sites.

One disadvantage of moving the algorithm is that we might make some
unintended changes.  The issue that blocked this previously was the
lack of documentation about CFNetwork's current content sniffer.
Hopefully we've resolved this by extracting the signatures from
CFNetwork accurately.

Adam