Re: serving up blobs for download

Matthew Kendall wrote: > > "Rob Montgomery" <Robert.L.Montgomery@Home.com> wrote... > > > The reason for the 2 distinct links is because if the remote user > > DOES have a pdf viewer installed, clicking on the link will always > > start the PDF viewer, which does not have a way to save the file > > either. > > Err, yes it does? The PDF Viewer plug-in displays a toolbar at the top with > a floppy disk button that performs this function. At least on my setup it > does. My linux version of acroread will only open a file using that floppy disk button. The only way to save a file would be to "print" it to a file instead of a printer (which is still much more work than I want for simply downloading a file). I admit I probably have an old version of acroread for linux, so maybe now its more like the windows version. > > You mentioned that it is ultimately up to the browser as to > > how to handle the content, and that we have no control over that. > > Well isnt that exactly why we have standardized content-types in the > > first place, so that we CAN have some control over these things? > > Well, no. The content-type describes the type of the content (duh), not what > action is to be taken with it. Once the browser knows what it _is_ it will > decide for itself what to _do_. Of course I realize that the content-type describes the type. But the type of file dictates the potential actions. You wouldnt expect a PDF file to open in your real audio player would you? But my point is that I was hoping to find a content-type like "generic-file" which would explicitly mean that the content was to be saved as a file and not interpreted in any other way by any other program. Netscape takes the logical approach that if it doesnt recognize the type, just save the damn thing as a file instead of crapping out like IE does. I get 2 different behaviors using IE5.00 on 2 different win98 boxes. One will allow me to download the file using the content-type: application/x-msdownload, while the other doesnt.... > > By the way, thanks for the newsgroup, I will definitely look there. > > If there is a way to do this (exploit or not), then I guess that is > > exactly what I'm looking for... > > Allen Flavell is one of the more knowledgeable people in that group, and he > has a web page you may find useful in explaining the behaviour you are > seeing in MSIE. > > http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/content-type.html Thanks, will do. Rob