Re: TXT or HTML? -- IE NEW BUG

[Aaron Whiteman <aaronw () wsu edu>]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2001, Magnus Bodin wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 28, 2001 at 06:56:15PM -0500, Nathan Neulinger wrote:
> > > IE doesn't recognize the extensions of files, which
> > > may contain some html
> > > code.
> > > Write a HTML file on NOTEPAD. save it as *.txt.
> > > upload to any server.then
> >
> > It's worse than that - even if you have a cgi script that outputs a
> > content-type of "text/plain" - some (all?) version of IE still processes
> > the doc as html. (This is a real PITA when using cgi scripts that output
> > plain text documents sometimes containing html.)
>
> No. But MSIE will do that if it finds some html-tags in the text.
> MSIE is programmed to act as it knows better than the webserver serving the
> MIME-header.
>
> I've put up some test-examples here: http://x42.com/test/mime/
>
> e.g. You cant start a textfile with the word "GIF89a" since it will be
> interpreted as a gif-picture. Pure magic-numbers stuff there.

Urk.  Omniweb 4.0.1 does bad things too.

blink1.gif: loads gif
blink2: loads gif
blink3.exe: loads gif
nopicture.gif: on first load, error:
  Cannot Load Address
  File is not a GIF: head is 'THI', not 'GIF'
   I assume this is the correct behaviour?
text.exe: for some reason, I can't get Omniweb to load this file.  No
          save dialog, no content.  odd.
text.html: "GIF89a ====== ..."
text.txt: same as text.exe.

IE 5.1b1 (3408):
blink*: all load as the blinken gif
text.*: IE appears to be attemting to load the file as a gif.

-- 
Aaron Whiteman -- Thoughts of graduation vaguely apply.
   RCW 19.190 notice: This address is located in Washington State.
 My opinions are mine and do not reflect the views of the University.
:wq