errors don't come back as Content-type: text/html

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Wed, 13 Jul 1994 01:28:46 +0200

I'm running a proxy server. If I send it:

GET gopher://nosuchhost HTTP/1.0
Accept: */*

I get

HTTP/1.0 500 Internal error
MIME-Version: 1.0
Server: CERN/3.0pre6
Date: Tuesday, 12-Jul 23:12:26 GMT
Content-Length: 299

but no Content-Type: text/html, although the result starts with
<HTML>.

Is this a bug in the Cern server, or is this a problem with lynx,
which interprets it as text/plain instead of text/html? The HTTP
documentation I can find online doesn't say whether the default for
Content-Type is text/plain, text/html, even though Content-Type is
optional.