Apologies... forgot to CC to the list... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Javier Ruiz <jruizmail@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Dec 18, 2006 11:25 AM Subject: Re: Problems with Zip+IE6 To: ceo@xxxxxxxxx Hi, Nah, the only thing I'm trying to do is to serve a regular zip file to the user of the app I'm coding, I could just put the file in an accesible folderand provide the link to the user (when I say accesible I mean inside the docroot of apache), but I really want the files (those zip files) to be available to the user ONLY if he's logged in and in a session with some background stuff... I did this a houndred times.... and really never realized about this problem with IE, I'm a linux user (Gentoo :-D ) since years ago and always used mozilla and/or firefox, but the users of the application I'm making now use IE, so they reported the problem thinking that it is related to our code. Ah! And it really doesn't matter what software you have to work with zip files, the problem is "before that software": The concrete problem I found is that when you click on a zip file link in IE, it asks you to choose: open it or save it, the only difference between both operations is that if you say "save it" it will download the zip file to a temp folder and then move it to the directory you specify; if you say open, it SHOULD download it to the temp folder and then "call" the application you have for zip files (winzip, winrar, whatever....) with the location of the file in the temp folder. I think all the browsers works more or less the same way. The problem with IE is that saying "open" it just doesn't download the file, but opens anyway the zip application with the temp file location, so the application (and not IE) complains that the requested location is not existing, in my case, WinRar... Indeed it matters the content-type to use with files in webpages! and as I mentioned before, I like your article because it's just pointing it, but I'm just trying to find out if anybody, doing any trick (dirty trick even) got the "temporally download" problem solved anyhow, and I'm trying whatever to get it. But unfortunatelly as much as I'm searching, I'm more realizing that this is an unsolvable bug in IE and I'll have to ask my client to "please, you will have to always download the zip files before opening them, or change your habits and use another browser". It's a recognised IE bug, it's not a PHP's mistake, not a coding mistake (by me I mean) but sincerelly, and I'll say it like it is... it's a pain in the ass! I appreciate Richard for your efforts, thanks a lot. Regards, Javi Ruiz. On 12/16/06, Richard Lynch < ceo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, December 12, 2006 4:34 am, Javier Ruiz wrote: > damn! that's a pretty good article, thanks a lot. > > unfortunatelly, it's not mentioning about zip files concretely, I > didn't > find a solution for my problem with them. > I tried playing a bit with the Content-type, but it seems that > Internet > Explorer doesn't really care about "Content-type"... it uses the > extention > of the file to determine the type (microsoft's way...) so it doesn't > matter > if I use "application/octet-stream" or even > "application/force-download" or > "application/makethisdownload-or-ikillyou" :-D as long as I name the > file " > whatever.zip", IE6 shows the "open with" dialog and if I use "open" > with an > application, it fails :( It does matter on real browsers... Use the correct content type for a download: application/octet-stream > thanks again Richard for the answer and for the article :) > > anybody with a miracle for the ZIP+IE problem?? You're going to HAVE to open the Zip file with some kind of unzip application such as WinZip, pkunzip, or, possibly, that goofball Windows unzip thingie that lets you pretend zip archives are directories, even though they aren't, but only up to a certain point, as you can't do some things with files in the zip archive that you can do with normal files, so it's just a very confusing Human Interface... Sort of like Windows in a microcosm. If you were hoping that somehow IE would magically unzip the item, and then let you open the contents within the zip file with a chosen application... Even MS Windows isn't THAT stupid. Yet. What if there are 2 things in the zip archive? For that matter, if there aren't 2 things, why is it even zipped? >> > 1 - To change the mimetype (when writting http headers) from >> > "application/zip" that I used before to >> "application/x-zip-compressed" >> > 2 - To not use MOD_DEFLATE in apache2 (I was not using it >> > really...) I now am beginning to wonder if you are trying to send your HTML as gzip'ed data for the browser to surf to your site, to save on bandwidth... If so, none of the above has any bearing on this at all... -- Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some starving artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So?
