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?

Regards,
A.D.B.

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