[WEB4LIB] Re: Is Netscape dead? I asked Jeeves

[Thomas Dowling]

> >I don't use Ovid, but.....  is it a MS problem, or an Ovid problem?  It
may
> >be that Ovid is passing the buck because their system isn't doing
things in
> >a standard way.
> >
> This is NOT an Ovid problem. It is a default setting in Explorer.


Strange that it isn't a problem at OhioLINK then.  It *is* possible to
handle this for IE at the server end, and the reasons for not doing so
include ignorance, indifference, and insistence on single-browser
development.

To reiterate, Ovidweb generates a "download" by sending out text prefaced
by the HTTP header:

Content-type: application/octet-stream

This is a little white lie.  The application/octet-stream type is defined
in RFC2046 as "uninterpreted binary data, in which case the simplest
*recommended* action is to offer to write the information into a file" [my
emphasis].  In fact, the data is either text/plain or text/html and in a
perfect world would be honestly transmitted as such, but I think we're
agreed that the realities of life at a public workstation would make it
problematic to manage and train the "Save As..." function for text
displayed in the browser.  Hence the octet-stream hack.

As I mentioned before, IE sometimes believes it knows better than you, and
knows better than the server.  Regardless of the incoming content type, it
will examine the incoming data, and if it decides it can display it, it
will do so.  In this case, that's not entirely wrong, as the content type
says the server has not interpreted it, and it may in fact be displayable.

The preferred solution is to explicitly identify the incoming data as a
file attachment, as detailed in RFC2183.  This also allows the server to
provide a default file name.  So OhioLINK's database interface sends out:

Content-type: application/octet-stream
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=download.txt

On receipt of this, IE obediently pops up its Save As dialog with
"download.txt" filled in as the default file name, as opposed to
Netscape's default of "ovidweb.cgi".

All of which is a long way around to saying: Ovid is one line of Perl away
from making this work for IE; making it work better than in Netscape; and
making it work in any other browser that conforms to these standards.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu

(Late breaking news: somewhere between Communicator 4.5 and 4.7, Netscape
added support for the Content-Disposition header above, so it will also
now default to "download.txt" if the server sends the header.)