<ot>Setting up a hyper text link to a binary file</ot>

On Tuesday, April 07, 1998 1:57 PM, Mikko Kurki-Suonio
[SMTP:maxxon@swob.dna.fi] wrote:

> On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Tim Jones wrote:
>
> > If you use http: then any browser will download it as text if it
thinks it is
> > hypertext use ftp: or file: in the URL.

IIRC Netscape had a section in their help system I found that stated
something like the above about 
http: protocol for their browser.

>
> Erm, no... the protocol part of the URL is actually there for a
reason:
> to define transmission protocol. You can't merrily put anything you
like
> there (even though NotScape would probably like you to think so).

True your server has to support the other transmission protocols ftp: ,
file:, gopher:
which may not be the case so...

Given the fact that its not that easy for mortals to change their server
side MIME
types. The easy fix I would suggest using a extension that is pretty
universally recognised as 
binary, server and browser side that is .zip (MIME type
application/zip).

If you zip your spreadsheet and set the link to file using
http://myserver/thing.zip transmission 
protocol it's more likely to work as you want.

Setting the MIME type in the browser doesn't always work as you expect.
For example I have
MIME type application/msword defined for all file .DOC and to launch MS
word as an action.
But trying to get a file by http://my_server/~docs/example.doc from the
local server doesn't launch 
MSword as expected but reads the binary file as html. Which is the
symptom I think people were 
reporting for the spread sheet.

I'm a Netscape user IE3/4 may behave differently.

>Short of that, you can also hope
> that more people would learn to use their right mouse button...

To do what exactly?

tim jones
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