[webkit-dev] Harmonizing content sniffing

[Christian Dywan]

Am Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:40:44 -0800
schrieb Darin Adler <darin at apple.com>:

> On Nov 14, 2008, at 2:32 PM, Adam Barth wrote:
> 
> > One disadvantage of moving the algorithm is that we might make
> > some unintended changes.
> 
> Another disadvantage is that any other Mac OS X libraries or  
> applications that rely on the sniffing done by CFNetwork will no  
> longer get the same results as WebKit clients.
> 
> Also, I don't think we've established yet if we can turn off the  
> sniffing in CFNetwork and keep the other desirable CFNetwork
> features working. There are a number of closely related features,
> such as the one that determines the suggested filename for a download.
> 
> I think the concept of moving the sniffing into WebKit is great if
> we can execute it successfully. I'm worried that it may be difficult
> to do that in the Mac OS X version and the Windows version used by
> Safari.

Hey,

I love the idea of unifying content sniffing across rendering engines.
So why not actually aim for establishing something like an argeement,
which, for a start, would be implemented in both CFNetwork and WebKit,
where a #define determines if WebKit's or CFNetwork's sniffing is used,
for the sake of running tests, and in the end the Apple ports could
continue using the platform's implementation by default, to keep
guaranteed consistency with other network clients that are not using
WebKit, even if CFNetwork may not be able to use the exact same logic
for whatever reason.

So everyone could benefit from the improvements.

Just my 2 pfennig,
    Christian