Steve,
thanks for your informative reply.
It seems to me that the most obvious solution would be for the 'download'
popup box to have a field for selecting ascii or binary transfer, with the
default being setup each time according to the current rules. Then you
could see what it was going to do and would have the opportunity to change it.
Too obvious, probably!
The subject may be a little bit off topic but I also considered that
downloading files is something that concerns most RTL users, so it's
probably of interest to other list readers as well.
bfn,
ajc
At 11:47 01/11/98 -0800, you wrote:
>This seems off topic so I will respond directly.
>
>Our experiments indicate that the way Netscape handles file downloads
depends
>on the link type and the mime header (if any), and the file extension.
>
>If the link is ftp:// then it seems to always use binary mode.
>
>If it is http://, and there is a mime type header (Content-type:
>application/octet-stream\n\n) then it uses this information for the download
>method. Application/octet-stream is always binary mode, as far as we can
>tell. Web sites should always wrap files with mime headers, to prevent
>unintended results. This can be done either with cgi scripts or by
editing the
>file itself. Obvously for archives, cgi must be used.
>
>Otherwise the file extension is used.
>
>There are occasional exceptions we have found, notably bugs in audio file
>players (maybe fixed by now). In these cases the mime header was ignored
and
>the file extension was used to determine what to do with it.
>
>The association with the file extension and how to treat the file is set
under
>edit->preferences ->navigator->applications, and then edit. Maybe you
need to
>set the file extension you were downloading. The mime type should be
>"application/octet-stream", and set it to always save to disk
>
>In general MSIE when you get into technical areas does things wrong in more
>cases than Navigator. For example, MSIE does not handle dynamic document
mode
>(multi-document mime types), ie, server push. Also, MSIE will not allow ftp
>uploads, or at least, we haven't figured out how to do it.
>
>But both companies should take their code out back and shoot it; they are
both
>way too buggy, leak core, and crash way too often.
>
>/sg
>
>
>> This is true, but there's no way to select whether Netscape then does a
>> binary or an ascii transfer.
>> I found that the download sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't
>> (especially for smaller files).
>> I finally came to the conclusion that Netscape tries to "guess" whether to
>> use ascii or binary mode and this guess seems to be based (in part at
>> least) on the file size... ie for small files an ascii transfer is done
and
>> for larger ones binary!
>> Has anyone got more detailed info about this or had similar experiences?
>>
>> ...ajc
>
>
>
>
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Andrew Cannon Fairlight ESP
Research & Development Sydney, Australia
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