Re: default return is "text/html"?
Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Wed, 13 Jul 1994 22:27:48 +0200
On Wed, 13 Jul 1994, Simon E Spero wrote:
> I'm pretty sure that text/html is the default in one direction (if no header
> is included, then text/html is assumed). MDMA automagically adds
> a Content-Type: text/html if no other typing information is available,
> and I think other servers do the same thing.
>
> Sometimes this is the wrong thing to do, but at least its consistent. The only
> other sensible alternative is to require all html files to have entries in
> in the type-mapping tables, and use text/plain as the default. Since that
> alternative breaks some of our document sets, I decided not to take that
> approach.
The problem seems pretty simple - the browsers should allow the user to
set the default type for rendering (and this should be settable on the
fly) and the server's default type should be easy to set, too. One of
the sites I maintain has mostly text files, so I set the default there to
text/plain. This is consistant with "liberal with what you accept,
conservative with what you spend".
Brian