241816 - allow TYPE parameters in anchor tags to override server MIME types

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Keith Briscoe]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040422
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040422

If a web server sends a (misconfigured) text/plain MIME type for a file, but the
A HREF link to that file contains the correct MIME type, Mozilla should either
1) assume the A HREF type is correct, since someone went through the trouble of
specifying it, or 2) prompt the user, because the web server and web page
disagree on MIME type.  My preference is 1, because the A HREF specified type
can only be wrong if someone intentionally screws it up.

Example: <a href="test.jar" type="application/java-archive"> on a default
Apache/Linux web server, which returns text/plain for *.jar files.  Currently
Mozilla (1.7 PR1/Linux) opens this link inline as a text file.  I think it
should assume it's a Java archive and act accordingly.

In a hosted environment web page authors may not have control over the server
MIME types, and they may wish to use type="xxx" in cases where they know the
server is wrong.  This may also aid evangelism efforts.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Note that the HTML spec explicitly says that the server overrides the <a type>,
so if we do this we should only do it for text/plain.

Also note that currently the type from <a> is set as the type hint on the
channel, so this would in fact have to be handled by necko...

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
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Comment 3

[Keith Briscoe]

This is still a bug as of 10/1/2005.  See Boris' comments for what may need to
be changed.

Comment 4

[Darin Fisher]

-> default owner

Comment 5

[Frankie]

The type attribute "is purely advisory". Overriding the server is against the standard, making this either an Enhancement request or Invalid.

Comment 6

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258