Closed Bug 280268 Opened 20 years ago Closed 20 years ago

Firefox ignores http-equiv content-type META tag when no HTTP header specified

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
General
Platform:
x86
Windows XP
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: emblue12, Assigned: bugzilla)

References

(
URL
)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Typically, a CGI application sends the HTTP Content-type header before the 
document is printed to the browser.  However, W3C HTML 4.0 specifications 
(specifically http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/charset.html) indicate 
that a webpage can instead use a META http-equiv tag to define the content-
type as text/html.

In firefox, a perl script printing an HTML document that has 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
but no HTTP Content-type header, the source page is displayed as text/plain.

MSIE correctly displays it as text/html.  It seems that firefox is ignoring 
the content-type tag.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a CGI script that prints out HTML.  The <head> of the document 
should include an appropriate META http-equiv="Content-type" tag.  There 
should be no HTTP Content-type header provided.
2. Load the page in firefox.  It displays the page source instead of the page 
itself.


Actual Results:  
The page source is displayed as plain ASCII text.

Expected Results:  
It should have processed the HTML and rendered an HTML-formatted document.
wget -S http://www.irstime.com/cgi-bin/test.pl
--22:32:22--  http://www.irstime.com/cgi-bin/test.pl
           => `test.pl'
Resolving www.irstime.com... done.
Connecting to www.irstime.com[217.160.234.69]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
 1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 2 Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 06:32:23 GMT
 3 Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix)
 4 Connection: close
 5 Content-Type: text/plain

That's not quite "no Content-Type header."
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 20 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
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