Preface with I'm not a front end guy, but I get the impression this was a major discussion topic around a decade ago. So this specific question is a resume tester, you claim 15 yrs experience on the resume, lets talk about a major gossip or controversial topic from 10 yrs ago that is pretty much irrelevant or uncontroversial today so someone with only 5 "real" years experience would have no opinion about the topic.
Also give the candidate a little BS, and evaluate the response. In programmer land if you ask a candidate what the first line '#!/usr/bin/perl' means in a CGI script and if the candidate keeps cool then thats good, but if the candidate responds like the intro scene of the movie Bladerunner then its probably not so great of a candidate regardless of anything else.
This is a bit unrealistic... asking someone what spacer.gif was used for could in theory work the way you describe, because it was something wide-spread and doesn't require you to recall too much details, just a general idea. On the other hand, issues like this xml mime-type thing are just too specific to recall after all that time. Frankly I don't remember half of the things that I've read last week and this was decades ago...
On the other hand, asking theback-end programmer what is a shebang line is totally legit in my opinion, nothing BS about it.
Preface with I'm not a front end guy, but I get the impression this was a major discussion topic around a decade ago. So this specific question is a resume tester, you claim 15 yrs experience on the resume, lets talk about a major gossip or controversial topic from 10 yrs ago that is pretty much irrelevant or uncontroversial today so someone with only 5 "real" years experience would have no opinion about the topic.
Also give the candidate a little BS, and evaluate the response. In programmer land if you ask a candidate what the first line '#!/usr/bin/perl' means in a CGI script and if the candidate keeps cool then thats good, but if the candidate responds like the intro scene of the movie Bladerunner then its probably not so great of a candidate regardless of anything else.