| A few corrections. IE is not preferring anything in your example. The default quality is 1.0, and since no quality is indicated for any type, they all share the highest preference. Although IE's Accept header is technically useless, it's more likely to be a response to developers incorrectly parsing Accept than the other way around. This post is about sites using primitive string matching to parse Accept, and it's not unreasonable to imagine that this problem is not new. You also claim that the spec leaves the resolution between text/html and text/* ambiguous, but it clearly states why text/html has precedence: "If more than one media range applies to a given type, the most specific reference has precedence." Lastly, I only get in a huff when people use illogic, especially ad hominems, to prop up a poor argument. In fact, I've written about this, too: http://shiflett.org/blog/2007/sep/logic I wrote a book on HTTP precisely because the spec is not always right, but that doesn't excuse everything. |