Sorry, can't convert format

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Date: Wed, 17 Mar 93 18:27:12 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9303171727.AA00915@www3.cern.ch>
To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Subject: Sorry, can't convert format
Cc: stellr@smyrna.cc.vt.edu (Ray Stell), www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch

| 

| Date: Tue, 16 Mar 93 23:57:13 -0800
| From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
| 

| Ray Stell writes:
| > Using 0.9 to the following:
| > 

| >        
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Tools/HTMLGeneration/txt2html.sed
| > 

| > returns the following:
| > 

| >       HTFormat: Sorry, can't convert from application/binary to  
www/present.
| > 

| > is it something I said?

Which, translated, means:  "I'm sorry, the document as far as I can
tell is binary and I don't know how to present that to you as
you haven't told me you can handle binary."

That is because I haven't reagistered .sed as text.  I just might
make the default text rather than binary. Anyone got any smart
ideas about how to distinguish (fast?).  In the mean time
I'll register a new suffix.



| That is DEFINITELY not a Mosaic bug.  Looks like the server is  
having
| a little trouble (the client/server architecture of WWW is such  
that
| error messages like this are returned from the server to the client  
as
| if they were the actual requested document -- the client never  
knows
| the difference [and thus doesn't *need* to know the difference,  
which
| keeps things simple]).


This simple but sometimes confusing system is richer with 2.0.
The response can be of type OK, error, forward, etc.  The error
message causes a different sort of object to be loaded.
[[Actually each client can do something different with the  
HTLoadError routine]]. 


Tim BL