Acting on a type: A client's job


It is entirely up to the client system to decide what to do with a document of a particular type. For example, on my system at home, I have configured Netscape to call xpdf when given something of the type application/pdf. I could have used ghostview or acroread as well.

Or, I could have simply had it not do anything other than prompt me to save the document to a file.

This interaction between server and client, provider and consumer strikes exactly the right balance, although it appears that some recent [1998] Email software has started to violate the the standards by trying to pass the names of programs to be called, instead of content-types when sending messages.

previous contents next

Jeff Goldberg