Precedence of YADIS information sources

[Jens Alfke]

On 22 Jan '06, at 12:25 PM, Johannes Ernst wrote:

> 1) The response contains an X-YADIS-Location header in the HTTP  
> header, and an X-YADIS-Location in the http-equiv attribute in the  
> HTML, and they point to different YADIS files.

This issue comes up a lot in conjunction with document encodings,  
especially XML. I believe you are correct that the specs say that  
HTTP headers have higher priority; but I also believe that, for  
reasons explained by your Argument B, in the real world the file  
content is given precedence. (My ISP has no clue what encoding I use  
for the .html files I upload to it, so why should its word count more  
than mine?)

Sam Ruby discusses this in his hilarious-because-it's-true  
presentation " 'Just' Use XML", starting here:
	http://intertwingly.net/slides/2005/xmlconf/70.html

This leads to his "Ruby's Postulate":
	"The accuracy of metadata is inversely proportional to the square
	 of the distance between the data and the metadata."

...But to play devil's advocate against myself, from the POV of my  
earlier post about security, it is certainly somewhat harder to hack  
the HTTP headers than the page content.

--Jens
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