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.
- The server cannot control what the client chooses to do with a
particular content-type.
- The client generally trusts the server to provide a correct
content-type, and only looks that the file name for clues
if the server failed to provide any content-type at all.
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.