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Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:21:01 +0200
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Subject: Re: AW: specifying the content-type
References: <15785B7E063D464C86DD482FCAE4EBA5014267AFB9E4@XCH11.scidom.de>
 <4DE54839.4080808@christopherschultz.net>
 <15785B7E063D464C86DD482FCAE4EBA5014267AFB9E7@XCH11.scidom.de>
 <4DE64850.8070700@christopherschultz.net>
 <15785B7E063D464C86DD482FCAE4EBA5014267AFB9F0@XCH11.scidom.de>
 <4DE68B3E.6060908@christopherschultz.net>,<4DE6B764.2090201@ice-sa.com>
 <15785B7E063D464C86DD482FCAE4EBA5014267CC8FF9@XCH11.scidom.de>
 <4DE7EC66.70605@ice-sa.com> <4DECDD13.8080804@christopherschultz.net>
In-Reply-To: <4DECDD13.8080804@christopherschultz.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Christopher Schultz wrote:
...
  For whatever reason, httpd wants to send a
> content-type and makes the default (text/plain) explicit for you if none
> is present.
..

per RFC 2616 :

7.2.1 Type
...
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field 
defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a 
Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of 
its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. If the 
media type remains unknown, the recipient SHOULD treat it as type "application/octet-stream".


So I guess that Apache httpd is trying to do the right thing, as per the HTTP RFC.
I would not be utterly surprised if httpd went to some length about this, and did some 
sniffing of its own on the response body, before it decides between "text/plain" and 
"application/octet-stream".

And yes, this must be one of these rare case where IE happens to be in conformance with 
the RFC, when it sniffs a content that has no Content-type header.
Based upon long experience, I think that this is purely an oversight by the IE developers 
however.
;-)


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