[21390] in Athena Bugs
Re: mozilla & websis on solaris
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kent Dorsey)
Fri Jan 31 09:25:52 2003
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 09:25:53 -0500
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Cc: chris avrich <cda@mit.edu>, bug-infoagents@mit.edu, websis-notify@mit.edu,
olcsuper@mit.edu
To: Kev <klmitch@mit.edu>
From: Kent Dorsey <kdorsey@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <200301302240.RAA02668@multics.mit.edu>
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Hi,
I support SSIT infrastructure, not WEBSIS directly or web browsers, but
I have a few comments.
If the server fails to send a mime type, then the browser uses its own
mime type table (a fundamentally flaw in web browser design, in my
opinion, but that's another discussion). I do not recall if the
browser mime type table can also override the server mime type.
There have been reports of various problems with WEBSIS that have been
verified on specific versions of Mozilla on Linux being used. I was
involved in the solution of an especially subtle bug involving secure
connections and a particular kind of redirect to another server, where
the Linux version behaved differently from Windows or Macintosh
versions. So, platform specific bugs do exist in the browser
processing of server responses, and they have been seen to be related
to secure connections, which comprise most of WEBSIS.
Based on my knowledge of the WEBSIS script designs, a mime type is
always sent. The WEBSIS team can double-check the script in question
for errors, of course, but I suspect that nothing is wrong with the
script.
My two cents. I really do not need be copied on this exchange, btw.
The WEBSIS team will contact my team with any blocking infrastructure
issues, once they have time to address this issue.
Kent
On Thursday, January 30, 2003, at 05:40 PM, Kev wrote:
>> In trying to submit data in websis (e.g. entering the PE lottery),
>> mozilla believes it is downloading a file of type "application/x-sh",
>> and thus fails to submit the data. If he selects "open this file with
>> mozilla", a new mozilla window pops up and gives the same message.
>
> I've seen this behavior before. I am absolutely certain it has
> nothing to do with the browser version or the type of machine the
> browser is running on. I would guess that the CGI script is, under
> certain circumstances, failing to send a "Content-type" header, and
> that the web server is for some reason filling it in as
> "application/x-sh", which is presumably the MIME type of the script
> file itself. I note that the data retrieved is invariably valid
> HTML data, which tends to support my hypothesis.
> --
> Kevin L. Mitchell <klmitch@mit.edu>
>
>
---
Kent Dorsey
Infrastructure Team Leader
Student Services Information Technology
email: kdorsey@mit.edu
phone: (617) 452-2189
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue W92-290
Cambridge, MA 02139
