> > There are many more of these. Debian's (lack of) handling of gzip as > a MIME type is broken, even with respect to HTTP. HTTP's handling of > gzip as a content encoding is intended to be transparent to the user: > if the file is stored on the server as a .gz file, it should arrive at > the user's end as a .gz file. Apache (or whatever web server) should > not tell the client to decompress it.
It's a feature of Apache to be able to pre-compress files to reduce network bandwidth and thus transmission time. In order to make this transparent to the user, Apache tells the browser the real type and that it is compressed. If the browser does not support tranfer-encoding, then it uncompresses before sending. > > > So, in other words, Debian broke it. Debian failed to recognize that > > > MIME and HTTP treat data types differently, and continues to do so. > > > And instead of fixing it properly, Debian decided to break MIME to > > > make it work for HTTP. Brilliant. > > > > Hindsight is always perfect. > > And having hindsight, you can always fix your mistakes. Even if you > don't fix it for current versions, you can correct your broken policy > and fix it for future ones. > If that's all it was, I wouldn't have a problem adding those types to the file despite the fact that mail programs *should *work with or without them. The risk of breaking existing webservers, however, is a very serious thing to consider. > Brian bcwh...@pobox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Treat someone as they are and they will remain that way. Treat someone as they can be and they will become that way.
