Re: default return is "text/html"?

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen (frystyk@ptsun00.cern.ch)
Thu, 14 Jul 1994 10:54:11 +0200

Two comments to the current discussion:

1) Take a look at the specs at

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Object_Headers.html

They say the following about Content-Type:

"As defined in MIME..."

Now take a look at the MIME spec, rfc1521: about unknown
content-types:

When a mail reader encounters mail with an unknown Content-type
value, it should generally treat it as equivalent to
"application/octet-stream", as described later in this document.

So my conclusion is that the specs _do_ say how to handle the situation!

2) In my opinion a missing content-type is equivalent to an unknown
content-type. I think it is a very narrow solution to assume that
everything unknown is HTML (or plain text) - this does not comply
with the normal level of abstraction in HTTP. The right thing
for the client to do is to treat it as "application/octet-stream"
and then dump the whole thing to a local file for further processing.

-- cheers --

Henrik Frystyk