263410 - embed tag handling not spec complaint with regards to mime types

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit Graveyard :: Plugin Finder Service, defect)

Description

[David Becker]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

On our company website we have a badly formed EMBED tag which specifies <embed
type="server" ...> because that is being used as a parameter to the embedded
Flash movie.  However, type is a reserved attribute for the MIME type of the
EMBED tag  This results in the plugin finder complaining about a missing plugin
and the movie doesn't render.  I know it's bad form (I didn't write it) to do
this, BUT after reading the HTML 4.01 spec, I'm convinced it should work anyway.
 If you read the spec for the OBJECT tag
(http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#h-13.3 -- since it doesn't
formally mention the EMBED tag), it says that if the TYPE specified on the
OBJECT tag differes from the Content-Type returned by the server while fetching
the object, the Content-Type should take precendence.  Our servers ARE properly
returning "application/x-shockwave-flash" for *.swf files.  If I'm reading the
spec properly, *that* should be used by the plugin finder, not the type="server".

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
See details
Actual Results:  
See details

Expected Results:  
See details

Comment 1

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

Who ever wrote the flash obviously had no idea what there were doing, as plugins
can get at any attribute set on the embed tag.

This is a wontfix and could cause other issues if implemented.

Comment 2

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

Make sure you have a pluginspage attribute pointing to macromedia so that the
user can download the plugin manually.