Finger info for chunky@icculus.org...

[2003-03-13]

Yet another browser sounding-off session.

There's a reason that HTTP headers exist. That MIME types exist. And
the reasons IS NOT that the browser knows better than the server.

By way of example:
Content-type: text/plain

If you're Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, pretty much anything except IE, then
it's rendered as plain text. Even if it's HTML. That's a Good Thing,
there's a reason for things like that. [eg, serving up source code to
HTML in-line scripting langauges]

And that's where my usual ranting finishes. IE sucks, Mozilla rocks.

But no.

Mozilla, in it's infinite wisdom sees the following, and renders it,
if it's been served up as text/plain:
Content-disposition: attatchment; filename=something.clf

Having flicked through RFC2183, the above should be interpreted as
"ask the user what to do with it", which IE actually manages successfully.

Of course, not to let IE off the hook, it does helpfully append a ".txt"
extension.

Grrr.

You see, I'd really hoped to avoid that whole application/octet-stream
thing for a simple text file. But no.

<mozilla> When I grow up, I want to be IE