Re: [cgmo-webcgm] MIME Media Type for ECMAScript

[Lofton Henderson <lofton@rockynet.com>]

Rob -- thanks for the excellent summary.  Could you please also send to the 
list:  your test program; the screenshot of the MessageBox you get?

All -- if you have anything to add (or challenge), please do so by ReplyAll.

Thanks,
-Lofton.

At 11:55 AM 5/13/2009 -0600, Robert Orosz wrote:
>All,
>
>During the development of WebCGM 2.0, I pointed out in one of my review
>assignments [1], that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
>deprecated "text/ecmascript" as the media type for ECMAScript scripts.
>Actually, IANA used stronger language than "deprecate," they called it
>"obsolete" [2]. This impacts WebCGM because the HTML script element has a
>required type attribute. The value of this attribute is the IANA registered
>media type (or content type as the HTML specification calls it) for the
>scripting language used in the contents of the script element. However, we
>subsequently discovered that Internet Explorer (IE), which was at release
>6.0 at the time, failed to execute scripts if the type attribute of the
>script element was set to "application/ecmascript" instead of
>"text/ecmascript" [3]. Since all of our implementers were targeting IE, we
>had no choice but to use the "obsolete" text/ecmascript media type in the
>specification text and in the test suite. By the way, the example in section
>3.4 of the current WebCGM 2.1 Editor's Draft, still uses
>"application/ecmascript" as the value of the type attribute of the script
>element. This change was triggered by my review [1], and we should probably
>revert that back to "text/ecmascript" as well in order to be consistent with
>the rest of the document.
>
>It retrospect, the failure of IE 6 to recognize application/ecmascript as
>the media type for ECMAScript is not surprising since IE 6 was released some
>five years prior to the publication of RFC 4329, which establishes
>application/ecmascript as the proper media type for ECMAScript [4]. However,
>with the subsequent release of IE 7 and especially IE 8 with its claim of
>being "more standards-compliant," I decided to revisit this issue.
>
>Rather than trying to execute a test from the test suite, which would
>require a WebCGM plugin on every machine I wanted to test, I created a
>simple HTML page with a script that executes when the page is loaded. The
>type attribute of the script element is set to "application/ecmascript" and
>the script simply modifies the last two elements in the HTML to state that
>the test passed. I've attached the HTML file to this message if anyone else
>wants to try it.
>
>IE 7 and IE 8 (as well as IE 6 of course) fail the test. Every other browser
>that I tried passed it. I'm a little surprised about IE 8 failing this test.
>Perhaps I am missing something. Does anyone know of a setting that enables
>IE 7 or 8 to recognize the application/ecmascript media type? I'd be curious
>to know what others think about this issue.
>
>Regards,
>
>Rob
>
>Rob Orosz
>Senior Software Engineer
>Auto-trol Technology
>11030 CirclePoint Road
>Suite 450
>Westminster, CO. 80020
>(303) 252-2262
>http://www.auto-trol.com
>
>[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/cgmo-webcgm/200509/msg00139.html
>[2] http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/
>[3] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/cgmo-webcgm/200605/msg00092.html
>[4] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4329.txt
>
>
>
>
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