Caching and opening files

[William Shipley]

If your server advertises the Mathematica file as the proper MIME type,  
OmniWeb will open it correctly.

If your server is set up to incorrectly guess that it's a plain text file,  
OmniWeb will attempt to display it directly, as it should.

We are confined by the standards of HTTP.  I agree that MIME is an  
incomplete standard, but we're stuck using it instead of file name  
extensions.

(Specifically, MIME doesn't provide for adding new content-types in an  
regular manner, so we end up with X-whatever, which seems to me no better  
than just having filename extensions.  Also, why only one content-encoding?   
What if you've compressed a file and uuencoded it?)

In a future version of OmniWeb, we may implement a guessing module that  
allows the user to set a preference to look at the extension of a file if  
the MIME type is suspicious (like text/plain or sometimes even text/html).

In the meantime, make sure your server is sending you the correct MIME type  
for the files.  To do this, you can just telnet directly to the port, and  
GET the file yourself, as below.  Note that you have to hit return twice  
after typing the GET command.

blah at wherever% telnet mywwwmachine 80                                        

Trying 198.151.161.16... Connected to mywwwmachine
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /whereever/my/document/is.ma HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
MIME-Version: 1.0
Server: CERN/3.0pre6
Date: Friday, 30-Jun-95 22:57:06 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1136
Last-Modified: Monday, 19-Jun-95 22:15:30 GMT

-Wil