[TUT] Writing Good HEC's

[K^2]

I dunno. If IE would act according to HTTP 1.1 specs, it would probably get a lot of the people off their ass and force them to configure the servers properly.

 

Speaking of, Apache itself doesn't reply according to 1.1 specs some times. If you request a PHP generated page with Accept-encoding: identity; q=1.0, *;q=0, server replies with 200 (OK) and chunked encoding. According to specs, it should reply either with identity or 406 (Not Accepted).

[BenMillard]

In theory yes, stricter browsers would prompt better standards compliance. But in practise that cannot happen because of the vast number of extremely low-quality websites which exist. If a browser stopped supporting them, there would be a biblical flood of customer support complaints and Bugzilla reports flying around.

 

The increasing strictness with CSS implementations hasn't improved the standards of people working with it. There's still loads of new sites being hacked together by people who never even think to test in a non-default text size or a different window size, let alone in a different web browser.

 

Web standards movement is becoming increasingly loud each year (like me in this topic). Slowly but surely, better practises are becoming less rare. But browsers still need to support legacy content and bad configurations to protect their market share.

[K^2]

A lot of web pages are put together by amateurs, but servers are written by people who are supposed to be professionals. You will never get rid of poorly written web sites, but the problem is often with servers not complying to specs. The text/plain error you described above is caused by misconfiguration of the server. If the default configs for the server would set MIME types by extension, that would not happen.

[BenMillard]

You'd think so, but actually a lot of servers are run by "amateurs". Or at least, not by standards-aware professionals. If all servers were being run by standards-aware professionals, they'd keep the relevant MIME configuration files up to date themselves.

 

But yes, if the default server installs listed more formats (particularly for video) that would help things. Apache comes which a fair few types mapped by default. There'd still stacks of legacy servers which are poorly maintained, but you're right that it would help things a bit.

 

In the meantime, browsers have to continue support for poor configurations so they don't lose users.