On 15 Sep 2004 at 17:39, Richard Yates wrote:
> >> MIDI files downloaded to my hard drive with Mozilla will not open
> >> in Finale ('Invalid file type' even though the extension is
> >> correct). These download and open just fine when I use Internet
> >> Explorer.
> >
> > This sounds rather strange. After all, browsers don't change
> > anything in the files they download.
>
> Well, now I cannot replicate the problem. Everything works today, and
> I did not save the apparently problematic files.
My guess is that you were bitten by Internet Explorer's too-forgiving
design.
On web servers, files are supposed to be given a MIME type, and this
is passed to the web browser. This is what is used by the browser to
determine what kind of file it is and what program to use to launch
it. In all browsers except IE, if the MIME type is set incorrectly on
the server, the browsers will do exactly what the MIME type tells
them, and nothing more.
Internet Explorer, however, is VERY SMART, and it guesses what the
correct MIME type is based on the filename and launches the file in
the appropriate program according to the file associations defined on
your computer.
Sounds great, right?
Well, no, it's *not* great -- the result is that a lot of websites
are incorrectly configured and the owners of those websites don't
even know that there's a problem because everything always works
correctly in IE, which is the only browser they ever test with.
A similar situation is the problem of tables that lack the closing
table tag. IE guesses where the closing tag should go, and renders
something that may or may not be what the creator intended. Mozilla-
based browsers display nothing of the offending table because it's
COMPLETLY INVALID HTML. The result of MS's decision to design IE to
guess when the HTML is invalid is that there are a lot of pages out
there with horrendously screwed-up HTML that only render on IE.
Programs should not try to guess certain kinds of things. In these
two cases, IE's forgiveness of invalid HTML and invalid website
configurations propagates problems to all sorts of people.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
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