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Such hints can be unreliable at best and misleading at worst. There is nothing to guarantee that the file extension and the Content-Type header will agree, nor
by neilalexander 4y ago
Such hints can be unreliable at best and misleading at worst. There is nothing to guarantee that the file extension and the Content-Type header will agree, nor is there anything to guarantee that the file name in the URL will match the download file name in the Content-Disposition header.
- lmm 4y agoWell, sure, but you can just... not do that? The <title> tag can be misleading because there's no guarantee that the title matches the content of the page - but the answer to that is to use good titles for your pages, not to avoid using the <title> tag.
- neilalexander 4y agoMy point is that it isn’t really reassuring for the user because of invisible negotiations. If anything, I would lean more towards guessing that users are, more often than not, either ignorant or untrusting of URL contents, either because the URLs so frequently look like nonsense (arbitrary content IDs instead of meaningful names) or because they have already proven to be unreliable elsewhere on the web (deep links not as deep as expected when copied or shared).
- lmm 4y ago> If anything, I would lean more towards guessing that users are, more often than not, either ignorant or untrusting of URL contents, either because the URLs so frequently look like nonsense (arbitrary content IDs instead of meaningful names) or because they have already proven to be unreliable elsewhere on the web (deep links not as deep as expected when copied or shared). I think users are (rightfully) distrustful of URLs in the general case, but a URL having a file extension is actually a pretty good indication that it's a simple "does what it says on the tin". (Imgur changing their .jpg URLs to have more complex behaviour caused a pretty big backlash, for example)