Closed Bug 405081 Opened 17 years ago Closed 14 years ago

Firefox builds with MathML support should advertise in Accept header

Categories

(Core :: MathML, defect)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: mikko.rantalainen, Unassigned)

References

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a9pre) Gecko/2007110704 Minefield/3.0a9pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a9pre) Gecko/2007110704 Minefield/3.0a9pre

This bug is a feature request for adding application/mathml+xml to Accept HTTP header in case Firefox has been build with option to support MathML.

An alternative could be inserting string "MathML" somewhere inside the User-Agent header, e.g. "MathML/2.0" to advertise greatest supported version. This solution requires less bytes for each HTTP request.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Setup a server capable of serving MathML or mathematical content rendered as GIF image
2. Target Firefox to said service
3. Server returns GIF images because it cannot know if Firefox is able to display MathML
Actual Results:  
Server returns image representation (because it cannot know if Firefox supports MathML or not).

Expected Results:  
Server returns MathML content for MathML enabled builds.

There exists bug 109825 for identifying MathML support with JavaScript but it cannot be used for initial content negotiation because the required JavaScript code cannot be executed before deciding which content should be served. In addition, JavaScript may be disabled. MathML content should be viewable without JavaScript.

Support for SVG has similar problem (Firefox can be build with or without SVG support, as far as I know).

This is a feature request but as there is no workaround for the server, I'll leave the severity as normal. This bug prevents serving MathML instead of (lower quality) images for Firefox.
Obviously, this also depends on bug 324857 to be usable.
Depends on: 324857
Component: Build Config → General
Product: Firefox → Core
QA Contact: build.config → general
+1 All content types explicitly supported by a user agent (ie, not by plugins) should definitely be listed in the Accept header
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Component: General → MathML
Ever confirmed: true
QA Contact: general → mathml
OS: Linux → All
Hardware: x86 → All
We quite purposefully do not do that because doing that leads to huge HTTP requests (noticeable pageload slowdown in many cases).  ccing gerv, who maintains the Accept header.  This is most likely wontfix.
bz is right - there's just no chance that we'll change every request sent out by Firefox to be bigger by 25 bytes, or even 10 bytes, for this reason. I'm afraid you are going to have to use JS, and set a cookie or something. You could also probably do something very smart with CSS, hover and CSS background images to get a server-side notification of support (which you could use to set a cookie) even when JS is turned off. 

Gerv
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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