[thelist] Playing with MIME type (was: Downloading .jpg & .pd f files)

[Pete Prodoehl]

> > > Is this going to work on IE/Windows? It's my understanding that IE
> makes
> > > guesses about files with strange MIME types based on the extension.
> Have
> > > you used this successfully? It's an interesting and clever shorthand
> (I
> > > like!) - but does it work to bring up the "prompt to save" box for
> most
> > > browsers in a reliable way? And does doing it this way impact
> Macintosh?
> > > It seems like feeding an unknown mime type might make it unviewable
> (to
> > > most users) on the Mac side.
> > 
> 
> 
On the Mac OS side it may or may not work, depending on the file extension,
and depending on the file type and creator code. We have an app that forces
the download of a text file, for our Mac OS users they get a file named
'exported.txt' but the OS does not know it's a text file because the file
type and creator code are not there... 

Ultimately we had to change the way it worked so that it loaded the file
into a browser window and instructed the user to use the File menu to save
it, but this had to do with character translation happening when we did a
straight download versus letting the browser load the file and interpret the
characters as it saw fit... messy indeed!

Pete



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