On 12 Apr 2010, at 06:53:46, David Hucklesby wrote: > This is a demo I made for him. The "view source" is named with a ".txt" > suffix, and sent as Content Type text/plain. But Internet Explorer, > alone among my browsers, insists on displaying the two files containing > HTML as if they were text/html.
This MSDN article <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms775147(VS.85).aspx> explains how Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, chose to break the web because they know so much better than those who wrote the RFCs. Basically, they chose to assume that "text/plain" was probably wrong in most cases (which might have been a real problem around 1997, but not one they should have taken it upon themselves to "fix" in this way), and instead examine the content to see if it might be something else. As in this case it looks like HTML, IE ignores the server and treats it as HTML. This post on the IE blog <http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/02/01/364581.aspx> explains that, when they tried to fix things in XP SP2, they found that the damage they had caused was so widespread that they had to abandon the fix (despite the fact that this content sniffing can be a serious security issue). They offer no useful solution. This article on the subject from Google <http://code.google.com/p/doctype/wiki/ArticleContentSniffing> has little to suggest either. Sorry I can't help, but with that information perhaps somebody can come up with a workaround. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Fitzsimons http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/ ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
