217070 - Excel files displayed by Mozilla as if they were HTML

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English Other, defect)

Description

[Keith Jillings]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030718
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030718

First appeared with Mozilla 1.5a.   

If I try to open an Excel page on a website, Mozilla treats the Excel file as an
HTML page and displays a page of random graphics.

Prior versions of Mozilla would open it as an Excel page and display correctly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Enter any URL that points at an Excel document.   I've put a very simple
Excel sheet on my website at http://www.jillings.org.uk/mozillatest.xls
2.  Press Enter
 

Actual Results:  
Page displays starting thus:
поЮ║╠А

Expected Results:  
Displayed the Excel page, which looks like this:
This is an Excel page designed purely to demonstrate the problem I'm having with
Mozilla 1.5a		
	One	1
	plus	+
	one	1
	equals	=
	Two	2


I do not have the same problem with MS Word documents on websites - Mozilla
opens these with Word and they display perfectly.

Comment 1

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

The server says:
Content-Type: text/plain

I think you need to send "application/vnd.ms-excel"

Comment 2

[Keith Jillings]

Don't follow you - send it where?  I'm trying to open Excel files, but Mozilla
tries to display them as text. 

Mozilla has a category "application/vnd.ms-excel" which shows the suffix xls,
but it doesn't use that instruction when I click on Excel files.   Surely it should?

Comment 3

[Bill Mason]

Mozilla tries to display them as text because the server says to.  It claims the
file is text/plain.

The only way to fix that is for you to fix your server settings.  Changing
settings in Mozilla will not fix the problem.

Comment 4

[Keith Jillings]

I don't understand.   I regularly create files using Excel.  There's one that I
put it on my website three months ago and haven't changed since.   Other folk
read it regularly.   It used to display as Excel with Mozilla 1.4RC2.   Now it
displays as gibberish (in text).

I've not changed anything on my website, and I don't know anything about the
server saying Content-Type: text/plain.   Where would I find that, and how would
I change it?   I just upload Excel files using FTP32.

I just checked with Internet Explorer, and the Excel files on my website all
opened as Excel.   The same files with Mozilla 1.5a open as text.

Comment 5

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

The "Content-Type" is a HTTP header that your server sends in addition the
content (your Excel file) so that the user agent (Mozilla,IE,...) knows what
type of content it is, this is called the MIME type.  Most user agents can be
configured to invoke an external application (like Excel) when it recieves
content with a certain MIME type (like "application/vnd.ms-excel").  In Mozilla
you can configure this under "Preferences/Navigator/Helper Applications".
The "file extension" only matters if you open local files.

This is a trace of what your server sends (in addition to the file content):

# wget -S -O /dev/null http://www.jillings.org.uk/mozillatest.xls
--20:27:30--  http://www.jillings.org.uk/mozillatest.xls
           => `/dev/null'
Connecting to www.jillings.org.uk:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
2 Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 18:26:18 GMT
3 Server: Apache/1.3.27
4 Last-Modified: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 10:52:05 GMT
5 ETag: "22003d-3600-3f474755"
6 Accept-Ranges: bytes
7 Content-Length: 13824
8 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
9 Connection: Keep-Alive
10 Content-Type: text/plain


Compare this with for example the server at www.microsoft.com:

# wget -S -O /dev/null
http://www.microsoft.com/italy/office/using/esperti/mediamobile/Media_mobile.xls
--20:27:36-- 
http://www.microsoft.com/italy/office/using/esperti/mediamobile/Media_mobile.xls
           => `/dev/null'
Connecting to www.microsoft.com:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
2 Content-Length: 53248
3 Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel
4 Last-Modified: Mon, 07 Jan 2002 21:52:02 GMT
5 Accept-Ranges: bytes
6 ETag: "0edd689c597c11:17ef"
7 Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
8 P3P: CP='ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo
CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI'
9 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
10 Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 18:26:25 GMT
11 Connection: keep-alive


Compare the Content-Type.

Mozilla has always had this behaviour.  Something must have changed on your
server.  You need to configure it to send the correct MIME type.  I think
you can do this by adding a line to a file called "mime.types" (but I'm not
very good at configuring Apache.)  Try http://www.apache.org/  - it's probably
in the FAQ (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html)

If IE isn't displaying the content as plain text then that is a bug in IE.
You should report this to MicroSoft.

Comment 6

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

invalid