warning to information providers re HTTP/1.0

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Sun, 29 Aug 93 22:53:08 -0500

A number of servers on the net are running HTTP/1.0 server software
that is not sufficiently configured to recognize the various
multimedia files that are being served. A common example is that the
server software is not realizing that ".au" means audio/basic, ".tex"
means application/x-tex, and so on. Instead, such multimedia elements
are being handed to HTTP/1.0 clients as type "application/binary".

The only thing a HTTP/1.0 client can do with "application/binary"
(which, for the record, isn't even a proper MIME type) is offer to
save it to a file. HTTP/1.0 clients will not look at file extensions
when communicating with HTTP/1.0 servers -- the MIME type returned by
the server will be considered the definitive type.

Sooooooooo, if you want your server to continue to serve multimedia
data elements to Mosaic for X 2.0 and all the other neat HTTP/1.0
clients that will be coming out Real Soon Now and you are running a
server that talks HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.0 clients, you should look into
this very soon...

Cheers,
Marc