Cousin Ricky <rickysttATyahooDOTcom> wrote:
> I discovered that the documents display correctly in Internet Explorer (at least
> through version 8), so the misconfiguration is probably unnoticed by most users.
>  (Leave it to Micro$haft to get it right by accident.)

It's actually not by accident. Internet Explorer deliberately ignores
the HTTP header protocol and tries instead to guess the right MIME type
by examining the received data itself. For this reason it will display
eg. HTML pages as HTML, image files as images and so on, regardless of
what the HTTP headers claim the MIME type is.

I'm guessing they made it like that because back in the day a good
majority of web servers were misconfigured and were sending files with
the wrong MIME type in the HTTP headers. (For example, while gifs and
jpegs might have been configured on the server side to be sent with the
proper HTTP headers, newer image formats like PNG were typically not,
so the server would by default claim that they were plain text, thus
looking like text garbage when looked with a compliant browser.)

The problem with this is that it breaks the HTTP standard and by being
back then by far the most popular web browser, the majority of web servers
never got configured properly. In fact, many people thought that it was
the other browsers that were broken, and IE the only one that worked
properly. (When in fact the problem was a misconfigured HTTP server, and
IE deliberately hiding the fact.)

Quite fortunately IE lost its popularity (thanks to Microsoft halting its
development for several years, for unknown reasons, causing it to fall
badly behind in implementing the newest standards), which means that more
and more servers had to be configured properly so that they would display
correctly with actual standard-conforming browsers.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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