Re: Why file content sniffing sucks

[Ralf Corsepius <corsepiu faw uni-ulm de>]

On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 19:20, Elliot Lee wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Fabio Gomes wrote:
> 
> > File type determination by content is crap. It's a misfeature. It is 
> > completely unnecessary. Its benefits do not compensate its drawbacks:
> 
> The "right solution" might be to use file content as a fallback if the
> file extension doesn't have a completely unambiguous meaning.
IMHO, it should be conversely, i.e. fall back to heuristics examining
suffixes, permissions and content if a content sniffer is not 100% sure.

I'd go so far to say, in a perfect world, given a perfect and complete
content sniffing algorithm, file suffixes should be entirely
disregarded.

Ralf