Sure. The way I had it written initially was wrong, however, because I
was saying that IE's behaviour was wrong BOTH in the text/plain and
application/octet-stream case. I now believe (correct me if I am wrong)
that IE is correct to try to guess content type in the
application/octet-stream case. However, you are right that doing so for
text/plain is plain wrong. I started to write up the FAQ entry explaining
the difference between the two cases, then I figured I would just be
confusing people, so I shortened it down to what I submitted.
I've attached a new patch which makes it a little more clear that IE is
incorrect in its behavior towards text/plain.
--
Joshua Slive
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://finance.commerce.ubc.ca/~slive/
Phone: (604) 822-1871
On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Marc Slemko wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Joshua Slive wrote:
>
> > These changes just provide slightly more accurate information about
> > browser mime type detection. (I was being a little too negative
> > towards Microsoft when I originally wrote this.) The same diff should
> > work against the 2.0 tree.
>
> I think this should still be explicit about the fact that IE's behaviour
> is broken and violates the specs.
>
>
Index: FAQ-E.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/cvspublic/httpd-docs-1.3/htdocs/manual/misc/FAQ-E.html,v
retrieving revision 1.5
diff -u -d -b -r1.5 FAQ-E.html
--- FAQ-E.html 2000/04/18 17:21:26 1.5
+++ FAQ-E.html 2000/08/03 19:45:51
@@ -594,14 +594,19 @@
Explorer, but show up as source or trigger a save window
with Netscape?</STRONG></A>
<P>
- Internet Explorer is ignoring the mime-type you have configured for
- the file and guessing the file type based on the filename
- extension. IE does this for any file which the web server marks as
- application/octet-stream or text/plain. Netscape, on the other
- hand, properly follows the directions of the web server and treats
- the file as text/plain (displays it in the browser window as-is) or
- application/octet-stream (pops up a download window).
+ Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape handle mime type detection in different
+ ways, and therefore will display the document differently. In particular,
+ IE sometimes relies on the file extension to determine the mime type. This
+ can happen when the server specifies a mime type of
+ <CODE>application/octet-stream</CODE> or <CODE>text/plain</CODE>. (IE's
+ behavior is incorrect in the text/plain case and this makes it impossible
+ to properly send plain text in some situations unless the file extension is
+ <CODE>txt</CODE>.) There are more details available on IE's mime type
+ detection behavior in an <A
+
HREF="http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/networking/moniker/overview/appendix_a.asp";>MSDN
+ article</A>.
</P>
+
<P>
In order to make all browsers work correctly, you should assure
that Apache sends the correct mime type for the file. This is
