Hi Tony On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:07:06 am Tony wrote: > Hello, > > If, by default, > PDFs open within the browser, then won't we be changing their user > experience by forcing them to open/save? > > Regards, > > Tony
Not really, the current position of "inline" PDF and other documents in probably due to the way the browser ships. I know a lot of people who dislike the inline thing and change it straight away, especially PDF's as it can slow or crash certain browsers (especially those beginning with F and ending in x). The other thing to consider is that people will generally save a document presented inline any way (it won't stay in their cache forever) and that a "Save As..." dialogue box will generally have an "open" option. So, the best "usability" is to allow the user to define what they want to do (either by allowing the user to select inline or downloadable files, or put it back in their hands and they can fiddle with their browser settings). To force download certain types of files (content-disposition: attachment), changes can be made at the web server level or in the middleware (PHP etc). How to do this is off topic for the list but I would quickly mention two gotchas that are: * only allow downloads from a certain directory lest you end up with downloader.php?file=/etc/passwd or even downloader.php?file=/path/to/databaseconnection.config * define the mime type properly when downloading as a lot of browsers use it to determine how to open a file. HTH James ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
