On Sun, 16 Apr 2006, Laurens Holst wrote:
> 
> Seems that nowadays some think heuristics are the answer to all 
> problems. Heuristically determine language. Heuristically determine 
> content type. Iâ??m afraid that in practice it will turn out that that 
> doesnâ??t work either, and certainly isnâ??t interoperable.

It can be interoperable if the heuristics are well defined.

And it might not work perfectly, but it works better than explicit 
labelling. This isn't a hypothetical statement -- for Content-Type 
browsers have unanimously found heuristics (even without a spec!) to be 
more reliable than content labelling. An earlier post on this thread 
pointed out the same thing is true for language tagging.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/        U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'