Why is it a failure of the college board to put "accept="image/jpeg"", instead of iOS which failed to default to the more standardized jpeg format when HEIC was not specified?
HEIC is a newer format which fewer systems support. iOS / Safari should default to JPEG in this case.
Which, in turn, means that the form isn't putting any constraint on what's being uploaded at all, and so there's no reason to think that the form is asking for an image in the first place. At that point, it's asking for a file. Any file. And so it has the semantics of taking whatever file you provide it as-is, with no transformation necessary. Just like when a client requests `Cache-Control: no-transform` from a server. It wants the thing on the other side sent to it as-is.
And, it's important to support those semantics (and that particular implicit meaning for leaving out the `accept` attribute), because such "as-is" uploads have many use-cases. The form might be e.g. a computer-forensics or antivirus-signature portal, that wants an evidence file; or the interface to a hex editor or decompiler, that expects a raw binary with arbitrary extension in unknown format; or the SCP component of an old web SSH terminal emulator. All these existed on the web, and used <input type="form">, before the `accept` attribute was introduced. So "not using the `accept` attribute" has to retain semantics that are backward-compatible with that legacy.
1. Correctly label their expected stream types. 2. Test all of the most popular devices before having something this broken in production.
What about a kid that's using a cheap android tablet from aliexpress? Are you arguing that the company nobody's ever heard of is at fault for not programming their tablet to use the correct image format? I agree that they should probably be using JPEG but that doesn't mean College Board is off the hook for making it easy for a user to not be able to use their product for something this important.
It really bothers me when programmers make excuses for laziness or shoddy work that results in user's being harmed. Start caring about your users.
The iPhone is the most popular phone model in the United States. This is on the College Board. It takes very little work to make this work properly, which ANY BASIC QA PROCESS WOULD HAVE CAUGHT.
I don't think the failure is with the accept type. I think the failure is with the bespoke JavaScript checking the filenames. That puts the failure on the College Board, not Apple.
But even if it did send HEIC, if you're going to fail to handle "any" format, then you better specify the one you can handle. By the same token, why shouldn't my computer convert every .docx to PDF, or some other "more universal" format?
Instead of specifying the requirement programmatically, they spent their time sending out tweets and writing help docs.
Point of order: separate people, with separate/independent/concurrent job responsibilities. It very likely wasn't the programmers tweeting and writing docs. (Heck, I expect that the College Board doesn't even retain any full-time programmers, only contracts with firms for projects.)
It's the same as if Apple shipped me an empty box instead of my iPad Pro. Of course I can't blame the customer support person who takes my call, and I shouldn't be rude to them. But I would still blame Apple the corporation for such a thing, had it happened.
2. Please try to read the entire comment. iOS does default to JPEG when uploading, the accept attribute isn't needed.
And if they really needed to control the file formats this much, they should have written this functionality into an app (for iOS and Android) and handled taking the picture themselves.
They really screwed things up for a bunch of kids here.