[thelist] Stop Word, Excel, PDF loading into browser

This would make sense, except that the browser \knows/ when it is getting a
document via HTTP vs. via local file system. I thought that the rule was: if
you get it via HTTP, the web server sends you a MIME type and you take that
as gospel. If the browser is just pointed at a local file with no server
involved, then it needs to make its best guess.

Netscape has done this for a long time: it accepts what the HTTP server says
the MIME type is, but resorts to looking up the extension in the registry if
it is getting something of from the file system.

Pretty simple and powerful logic, it would seem.

Michael Lee Squires
IBM NUMA-Q Web Architect
michael@sequent.com
+1 503.578.9891

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Czechowski, Aaron [SMTP:aczechowski@towson.edu]
> Sent:	Tuesday, December 21, 1999 4:54 AM
> To:	'thelist@lists.evolt.org'
> Subject:	RE: [thelist] Stop Word, Excel, PDF loading into browser
> 
> 	Not that I'm defending the folks in Redmond for this, but AFAIK,
> since IE is now becoming more and more part of the OS and less and less a
> stand-alone web browser, it's pulling the file type from the OS as defined
> in the registry, which is based upon file extension.  The MIME type is part
> of it, but ultimately it's the extension that defines the file in the
> Windows world.  So unless Microsoft pulls IE apart from Windows, we're
> stuck
> with how Windows deals with the files and not the browser....
> 
> Aaron  :)
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Oliver Lineham [mailto:oliver@lineham.co.nz]
> > Sent: Monday, December 20, 1999 6:48 PM
> > To: thelist@lists.evolt.org
> > Subject: Re: [thelist] Stop Word, Excel, PDF loading into browser
> >
> > Thanks, I'd tried that but it seems to make no difference to 
> > IE what MIME 
> > type HTTP calls it at all.  IE still sees the .doc extension and 
> > opens/shows it within the browser frame.
> > 
> > Kind of defeats the whole reason those MIME types were 
> > invented for in the 
> > first place.
> 
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