>>We just love to hear sweeping generalizations like that one... ;o)
>Its not a generalization, its my experience.
>
>I don't personally use a Mac anymore. I never had any luck downloading PC
>files on my Mac and transferring them to a PC...
A certain amount does depend on the server (having it send the right mime
types, which ours does) as well as the browser (having it be configured to
do the right thing with each mime type). Using a download application like
Anarchie, for example, usually works better than using IE or Netscape in my
experience.
FWIW, I use a Mac and a PC interchangeably for posting things to our web
site, and for testing the downloads, so I know that .zip works fine on a
mac in general. I've stopped posting .sit versions as well as .zip ones
since most of the current mac software now seems to do the right thing by
default, and I get hardly any complaints about .zip problems (though a few
years ago, they were common).
One other thing is that servers will often try to be "helpful" and do the
line-feed conversions, which does indeed trash binary files. If you
transferred files from your mac to a pc via a floppy or server which did
this conversion, you'd have to have made sure the mac filetypes (the
four-letter ones which aren't part of the filename) were correct. Too
often they default to 'TEXT' if downloaded by a browser, which causes the
mess-ups. Change the filetype of a zip file to be '????' and it won't get
munged when being put on a floppy.
-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support
