249696 - better error message for content auto-detection needed

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 285517

(Core Graveyard :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[Peter Oliver]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510 Galeon/1.3.15
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

http://www.triv.org.uk/~mavit/typescript is a text file containing occasional
control characters.  As I understand it, it is valid ISO-8859-1, and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1#ISO_8859-1_vs_ISO-8859-1 seems to
support this view.  The web server delivers it with the header "Content-Type:
text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1".

However, Mozilla has other ideas.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.triv.org.uk/~mavit/typescript

Actual Results:  
A box popped up saying:

    The file "typescript" is of type application/octet-stream, and Mozilla does not
    know how to handle this file type.  This file is located at:
    
    http://www.triv.org.uk/~mavit/
    
    What should Mozilla do with this file?
    
     ( )  Open it with the default application
     ( )  Open it with [                          ] [ Choose... ]
     (*)  Save it to disk

The dialogue box says that the file is of type "application/octet-stream", even
though the web server explicitly said that it's a "text/plain".

Note also that there is no option to open the contents directly in Mozilla
(although it appears this is already being tackled in bug 57342).

Expected Results:  
I'd expect the contents of the file to be displayed on the screen, which is what
used to happen.

I appreciate that perhaps most supposedly text/plain files containing
non-printable characters are actually binaries, and you could argue that if a
file contains control characters then it's not suitable for displaying anyway,
so perhaps asking the user what to do isn't a bad idea.  However, you should
explain what's going on, rather than "lying" about the content type to the user.
 Something like 'The file "typescript" claims to be of type text/plain, but
looks more like an application/octet-stream.  Mozilla does not know...' seems
less likely to cause confusion to web developers.


Also reproduced with Firefox 0.8 on Windows 2000.

On Linux, with Firefox 0.8 as downloaded from Fedora, the text is always shown
inline.

Comment 1

[Jesiah S]

For reference this is one of the special cases from bug 220807.  If you change
the iso to Iso it works fine.

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

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

fixed later in bug 285517, because I couldn't find this bug :(

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 285517 ***