Re: File Download Headers

Richard Lynch wrote:

Can any experts on this list explain to me why, despite the 1,000,000 places that application/octet-stream is documented to work, and has always worked, since Mosaic 1.0 days, people manage to find these goofball Content-type: headers that are supposed to work, but only work in a handful of browsers, and then they write tutorials as if it's the Right Way, and then those tutorials get past alleged Editors, and are all you can find from Google? Anybody? Well, I can't vouch for any goofballs, their editors, nor google, but unfortunately sometimes an alternative to application/octet-stream has to be used to work around brokenness in certain versions of IE...We used octet-stream, and had a small portion of users complaining because they couldn't open the file that was downloaded - "I can't open download.php", hence the workaround.

- We can't use download.php?/filename.ext - (long story, but suffice it to say that it can't be done for non-technical reasons.) - IE doesn't take the Content-Disposition in some cases unless you use a different content-type. Our code basically does this: if (IE) { use wrong content type; if (IE 5.5) {

      use broken content disposition;

} else {

      use normal content disposition;

} } else { do things in a standard way; } jon