At 01:16 PM 11/3/00 -0500, Rick Onanian wrote:
...
>
>Web browsers are not good FTP clients.
True. But when you offer the ftp site from a Web-based link, you have to
anticipate that they will often be used to access the ftp site and take
account of their limitations.
Whether you like them or not, if we do not accommodate their limitations,
we'll be sentenced to explaining this problem over and over on the leaf-user
list (or wherever questions end up being posted).
>However, it would be important to know how web browsers choose
>binary or ASCII for FTPing. I would guess that they do it
>based on their own mime-type list.
This has been discussed again and again back on the LRP list. Neither of the
major browsers does what you guess.
Netscape trusts the accuracy the mime type reported by the Web server.
Period. If it is wrong, then Netscape handes the file wrong.
IE starts with this same mime type, but also does some (undocumented, to my
knowledge) analysis of the file itself to see if a text designation is
plausible, then overrides it to binary if the plausibility tests fail. This
is why some sites advse people having problems with downloads to try IE
(basically, so the site managers can be lazy about configuring their
mime-type lists properly).
All of this is less important for Linux-only users, since Linux hosts do not
do any binary/text translation. Windows hosts do, so they mess up the
content of binary files misidentified as text. Probably Mac hosts also
convert, though it's been years since I used a Mac so my memory is hazy.
--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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