Re: confused about web servers
On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 08:21:01PM -0500, Allan Wind wrote:
> On 2008-02-14T19:53:13-0500, Steve Kleene wrote:
> > Can someone here explain why the choice of web server determines whether the
> > movie plays or not? I would have thought that the web server would just copy
> > the WMV file to the browser, which would then decide whether to play it or
> > display it as text.
>
> The web servers probably returned different content types, and the
> browser behaves differently based on that.
...or at least the browser *should* behave differently based on that.
Some years ago, I was working on a web-based voicemail/telephony
interface and discovered that the then-current version of MSIE would
look at the last portion of retrieved URLs and, if they looked like a
recognized file extension, it would completely ignore Content-Type and
attempt to behave based on the extension. I lost a fair bit of time
trying to figure out why it kept trying to execute the page returned
(with Content-Type text/plain!) when I started testing login with an
email address. MSIE saw
http://some.server.com/foo?blah=blah&email=bar@baz.com
as a .com file and wanted to treat it accordingly...
I'm pretty sure that's been fixed by now (or at least I really hope it
has, given the security implications!), but I could see it happening
again.
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