support of default document names

George Phillips (phillips@cs.ubc.ca)
Sat, 26 Feb 1994 00:41:56 --100


altis@ibeam.jf.intel.com said:
>Currently, there is no standard way to determine a default name to use for
>a document retrieved on the Web. Clients prompt the user for a filename or
>make up some temporary name that doesn't correspond to the original item.
..
>which will be opaque. The simple solution would be to follow the MIME
>Content-Type addition of "name=" in the HTTP server response, so that
>instead of a response like:

As you said, using the base name of the URL path works reasonably for
URLs. lynx does that, but Mosaic for X doesn't. Until more browsers
do this simple thing, I can't see us getting far with "name=" (which
is a fine idea).

I made an attempt at making Mosaic use the basename, but the !Y#^%@&
Motif file dialog doesn't seem to have any clue about default save
names. Maybe some Motif wizard could kludge it in, but the best
alternative I came up with was a "save as foo.gif" button. Haven't
got around to implementing it. I can certainly see why X Mosaic
doesn't do "this simple thing" :-)

Alternately, one could add a "Document-Name: " header. Same difference,
but maybe an extra header is more MIMEish.