On 10/25/2012 09:31 PM, Anthony D. Baye wrote:
> Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>> 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
>
> it also seems to be serving the images as raw binary, because every time I click
> on an example image, it wants me to choose an application to handle it.
>
> Is the server running Apache or IIS?

Apache ... the server runs on FreeBSD unix

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