Re: Jama.jar seems broken

[Bruce Miller <bruce.miller@nist.gov>]

T F Hudson wrote:
> 
> Ah, yes... This is a longstanding problem. Netscape indeed is not bright
> enough to download a JAR file. So far as we can tell, Netscape looks at
> the extension to decide whether to use the ASCII or BIN mode of FTP, and
> for JAR files chooses ASCII which then makes assumptions about carriage
> returns that aren't valid, and the download damages the file.

Not to beat a dead horse, but actually that's Internet Explorer's
typical approach: It will decide on the mime type based on the
extension,
_even_ when the server tells it that it's a different type.

In this case, my server told Netscape that the file was plain text,
(which was wrong) so it did the "right" thing, which was convert 
and ruin it.

IE _ignored_ the mime type that the server sent OR it doesn't do
carriage return conversions... I dont know which.  (maybe two
wrongs make a right?)

The problem starts with most servers defaulting to text/plain for
any file extension that it doesn't know explicitly about.
That's reasonable, since there are more random extensions 
that end up being text than end up being binary (at least for
files served up by http).
Alas .jar is binary, but hasn't found it's way into mime.types
lists.  I'll need to add an AddType directive... or maybe it's
time for mime-magic (which would claim that it's a zip file).

> ...
> Internet Explorer works.
By accident!

----------------
Bruce Miller
<bruce.miller@nist.gov>  http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/