Posted by Mark Parnell on 01/25/06 07:39

Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, John Salerno
<johnjsal@NOSPAMgmail.com> declared in alt.html:
> Mark Parnell wrote:
>> It's configured on the server. Depending on what brand of web server it
>> is, and how much your host allows you to do, you may be able to do it
>> yourself. But for the most part it's up to the host.

Forgot to mention: If you are generating the pages via a server-side
script you can set the HTTP headers in your script (e.g. PHP's header()
function).

> Forgive the constant questions: And how does the server determine how to
> serve it?

Generally it's by file extension.

> Does it read the DTD and then pick the best type, if
> available?

The server doesn't actually look at the contents of the file. And this
goes for *any* file served from a web server, not just web pages.
Images, PDF files, executables, zip files...they all have their own mime
type.

> Or does it perhaps default to HTML unless you specify
> otherwise somehow?

If it's an unknown file type, most servers will default to text/plain.

Incidentally, despite all the above a certain OS component that
masquerades as a browser may try and second guess the type of the file,
regardless of what the server says it is.

--
Mark Parnell
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