"Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch> wrote in message 
news:Pine.LNX.4.62.0604162159180.21459@d......
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. I'm afraid that in practice it will turn out that that
>> doesn't work either, and certainly isn'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.

I'm slightly intrigued by this conclusion, as your tests are almost 
universally passed not failed by my IE6, almost certainly the most used 
browser there, the failures are in <img src= ... > and other referenced 
stuff where there's other metadata available of the type of the resource.

The "content type sniffing test suite" all the tests are passed by IE6. 
Could you explain a little more how you reached your conclusions about them 
ignoring the information - perhaps publish test results of other UA's I'm 
surprised other UA's have not followed IE here, they do in most other stuff.

Jim.