Re: Curious ftp problem with squid 1.1.3

On Fri, 17 Jan 1997, Robert Thomas wrote:

> > >Meanwhile, everyone can argue about which content type should be the
> > >default.
> > text/plain: 1 vote
> > octet-stream: 5 votes
> > both: 1 vote
> Hurm, I assumed that everyone would be sensible and set the default
> mime type to be a displayable format.

Now, now, let's not get nasty! ;-) I must admit to counting myself
amongst the "application/octet-stream" crowd (so that's 6 votes), not
because I derive any joy in making things seem complicated for the
end-user, but because I too find that most items received via FTP are
transferred in binary mode anyway.

Heck, even on our Web server I've set the default type to binary (instead
of NCSA's default of "text/plain") because most of the otherwise untyped
files that people put on our server are binary in nature; if someone
wants to publish a directory of predominantly text files, then a quick
".htaccess" addition fixes that problem so that for the directory in
question, the default is now text.

I don't know what is/could be the equivalent of a ".htaccess" hack in the
proxying arena, or even if something like that could be done; perhaps it
would require some form of MIME-type matching capability in ftpget,
similar to what the Web servers use when returning untyped documents?

> If it's gabage, all the user has to do is click 'back' and then hold
> shift while selecting the link, which will then let them save the
> contents of the link to a file.

Maybe your users are more sophisticated than those of the rest of us; I
know I've seen some of our users open an MS Word document, ignore the
garbage and proclaim, "This is a text file!" because they can recognise
some of the text. Those same users wonder why things have gone wrong
(can't open in Word, &c.) when they begin treating the files as "text"
files rather than "binary". :-(

Why not just make the default a "squid.conf" keyword option so that it can
be changed as/when required without recompilation? Would that help to
satisfy everyone?

> This works on NS and MSIE.

No comment. ;-)

dave
Received on Thu Jan 16 1997 - 16:44:34 MST