Tomcat bug 53814 - PDF plugin in IE cannot download correctly

[David Wall]

In researching a bug our users are now suffering, I found that it was 
reported already as *Bug 53814****- Could not display PDF file on Tomcat 
7.0.27 above.*

Sadly, it also shows that's it's considered "invalid" and won't be fixed 
because the change made between 7.0.26 and 7.0.27 is "standards compliant."

That's a rather unsatisfying answer considering it affects PDFs and IE, 
a rather common combination.

The change was made in the 7.0.27 release, causing the bug to appear.  
Yes, the bug is in fact in the PDF reader of IE, but it is sad when a 
bug release (not going from 7.0 to 7.1, but 7.0.26 to 7.0.27) introduces 
new problems.

Putting the space separator back in seems so straightforward unless 
removing the space actually fixes something else. It is not clear in the 
bug report if the change was made for a particular reason or not since 
bug 52811 doesn't appear to be an issue with 'boundary' at all.

It is not clear that having the space would not be compliant with the 
spec.  The comment in the bug report even says that all of the examples 
in the specification have a whitespace before parameter.

I guess I can understand a change like this that will break working 
systems if the change were required to be standards compliant and 
standards-compliant browsers had trouble because of the space being 
there, but if not, it shouldn't occur in such a late patch release 
(7.0.27) rather than a new minor release like 7.1.

I hope that keeping things working is the prevailing idea behind patch 
releases.  Of course, it's not surprising that IE would be the one 
browser to have this problem handling standards-compliant syntax!

David