307823 - multipart/x-mixed-replace is not advertised in accept header

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Benjamin Carlyle]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050730 Firefox/1.0.6 (Debian package 1.0.6-2)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050730 Firefox/1.0.6 (Debian package 1.0.6-2)

At present applications such as bugzilla that make use of
multipart/x-mixed-replace do so based on the user-agent header. If other
applications supporting x-mixed-replace appear they won't get the advantages of
that support unless they can convince content producers to include their user
agent field also.

I'm currently working on a proposal[1] to use x-mixed-replace and possibly a new
experimental multipart for publish subscribe over http and am implementing
clients and servers to support these functions in a proprietary environment.

[1] http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HttpSubscription

Benjamin.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Make a brower request.
Actual Results:  
multipart/x-mixed-replace does not appear (expliclity) in the accept header

Expected Results:  
multipart/x-mixed-replace should appear in the accept header

I understand that concerns over bandwidth may make this bug a WONTFIX unless
widespread support for the mixed content types emerges.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

As you say, changing the Accept header is a delicate balance. We don't want to bloat it.

It seems to me that the best time to add something would be at the beginning of the content-type's life, and try and get all user agents to add the type as they begin to add support. It's probably better only to list official registered content-types. Both of these principles would lead to a suggestion that adding multipart/x-mixed-replace wouldn't really help anyone at this stage.

Following those principles, maybe we should have added SVG for Firefox 1.5?
<checks> It seems the SVG team don't think our support is good enough yet.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240493#c80

Gerv