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.
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