Subj : Re: E4X support in mozilla?
To   : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng
From : Lars T Hansen
Date : Mon Feb 07 2005 01:41 pm


Brendan Eich <brendan@meer.net> writes:

> Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
> >>>Unfortunately Opera browers for instance try to consume such <script 
> >>>type="text/javascript;e4x=1"> and then obviously throw syntax errors.
> >>>      
> >>>
> >
> >I raised this with our JS guys at Opera.
> >  
> >
> 
> Any response?  I shouldn't expect unknown MIME type parameters to cause 
> the script content to be ignored, so no worries.  Martin pointed this 
> out in another post, thanks to him too.

I actually changed Opera's behavior in response to the earlier posts
in the thread, so that an unknown parameter would effectively disable
the script and trigger a NOSCRIPT block if present.  Despite not being
backward compatible it seemed sensible: it would be analogous to
recognizing a parameter name but not its value (as in the case of
"text/javascript;version=2.0").

Martin Honnen asks for a backwards compatible mechanism whereby JS+E4X
will not be executed by engines that don't know it.  For this, a new
language tag / MIME type seems unavoidable.  I'm not sure that is such
a bad idea.

--lars

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