Gemal's Psyched Blog - Comments on Autodetect correct MIME type from text/plain content

By Olivier Cahagne

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 23:27:16 +0100

WinXP SP2 will change its default MIME type behaviour to a stricter one:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7bd948d7-b791-40b6-8364-685b84158c78&DisplayLang=en

By Sharki

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 06:50:42 +0100

I hope this is done in a sane way. Like allowing you to right click on a link and have it give you an option to view/save it in a different way, and not just catering to stupidity. That would start to lead us down the road to a adding a IE mode to page rendering...

By Ted Mielczarek

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 14:53:55 +0100

Sharki: The implementation is very sane. bz wouldn't do it any other way. It only applies if the Content-Type is either "text/plain" or "text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1", which are the default setting on most versions of Apache, and the text does not start with a Unicode byte order mark signifying UTF-16/32, and the body contains embedded ASCII control characters, such as NUL. It's not going to start ignoring valid Content Types, and if your text/plain document has control characters in it, and isn't Unicode, then you're breaking the HTTP standard anyway.

By Sharki

Sat, 20 Dec 2003 05:46:49 +0100

But now webmasters won't have any reason to fix their servers. Atleast before there were some people who would complain. Now they can say that it works, so they shouldn't have to fix it.

By Stef

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 14:24:26 +0100

Can anyone confirm this fix will also end-up in the normal mozilla build or only in Firebird ?

Thanks,

Stef