Re: TXT or HTML? -- IE NEW BUG

From: Aaron Bentley (abentley@panoramicfeedback.com)
Date: 07/30/01 

Message-ID: <3B65B995.4C678238@panoramicfeedback.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 15:46:29 -0400
From: Aaron Bentley <abentley@panoramicfeedback.com>
To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: TXT or HTML? -- IE NEW BUG

In my experience, file extension supercedes MIME type in IE.

I have noted several cases where servers were misconfigured, and yet IE
rendered external files correctly. In one case, it was an ASX file (the

ActiveStreaming equivalent of a RAM file). Netscape paid attention to
the MIME
type, and displayed the text in a browser window. IE launched Windows
Media
Player.

This problem was later solved when the server was correctly configured.
It's possible this behavior was based on magic cookies, I suppose. But
can they have cookies for every 1

I have also noted that cgi-generated PDF files are not handled correctly
in
some IE/Acrobat combinations, yet normal PDF files are handled
properly. By
configuring an alias for the cgi program with a PDF extension, I was
able to
get IE to launch Acrobat properly.

Aaron

Justin Nelson wrote:
<snip>
> **I don't think the actual file extension makes any difference on
remote
> files**
>
> Once IE determines that it is responsible for rendering the file
directly,
> it will show it however it feels appropriate. It will do this by
completely
> ignoring the MIME type and extension, rendering based on content
(exception:
> text/html is *always* rendered as HTML, whether or not there are HTML
tags).

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