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Posted by Marcus Bointon on 11/15/05 01:24
On 14 Nov 2005, at 19:01, Richard Lynch wrote:
> It may not be my final choice whether they download or not, but if a
> browser doesn't treat:
> application/octet-stream
> as a download, and only as a download, then that browser is pretty
> broken.
>
> Letting the user configure their browser for that MIME type to be
> opened by an application is just plain wrong for a browser, by
> specification.
>
> If you find a browser that lets you configure application/octet-stream
> to be opened with a specific application, then file a bug report with
> whomever wrote that browser.
There's no such spec for browsers per se (which is why they vary so
much) - they are just HTTP clients. I can think of a perfectly
reasonable situation where I would want a plugin to handle
application/octet-stream - say I'm pulling some arbitrary binary data
and while I'm debugging, an in-browser hex dump could be very useful.
The other thing is that I may be being forced to use that 'wrong'
MIME type to work around bad implementations of content-
disposition... I know that's not a common situation, but there should
be nothing preventing me from doing it. There are browsers that don't
do downloads at all (I've written some), there are others that do
nothing but downloads (I use Interarchy for just that). I could offer
a similar opinion about the browsers that have odd implementations of
content-disposition.
Marcus
--
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Putting you in the picture
marcus@synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk
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