Re: Jama.jar seems broken

[T F Hudson <tfhudson@home.com>]

Ah! I'll go to work on "Mordac the Preventer of Information Services"
and see if the IT folks can fix my server.

Thanks,

Tiff

Bruce Miller wrote:
> 
> 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/