RE: Microsoft's "I mean it" content-type parameter

> It would be very fun to see the example they cite, I sincerely doubt they
> exist to any legitimate extent today.  Our friends crawling the web could
> probably give us hard numbers.  I suspect the short history goes;
>
>   * some folks start serving files over http:, associate .html with text/html
>
>   * 1000's download ms authoring tools to create default.htm files
>
>   * 100's uploading to these "ancient" servers discover they render as either
>     binary/octet-stream or text/plain
>
>   * MS fixes their client to display .htm files as html
>
> Interestingly, they don't work around the fact that all of these servers are
> also configured to serve index.html and not default.htm.  If they relied on
> the administrators to fix one side of the coin...

William -

There are tons of legitimate use cases here they you have completely overlooked. For example, lots of server side applications throw out content of a type different from what their file extension would indicate. For example, the earliest "hit counter" programs were .cgi or .pl files (typically) generating image/gif or image/jpeg content. The Web servers were set up explicitly to serve the output of those applications as text/html. And a great many developers had no idea that they needed to change the Content-type at the code level to make this work. Content sniffing made life easier for these developers. Indeed, Content-disposition is a brutally critical header for any developer making, say, a file download application that actually spews forth the bits itself instead of performing a redirection.

J.Ja