text/plain really is?

Internet Explorer doesn’t believe us when we claim “Content-type: text/plain”, and just makes something up. MSIE employees admit this content type non-compliance, but have done nothing to fix it, under the banner of backwards compatability.

In effect, if IE is told the file format is text/plain, but it encounters html-looking text, it assumes it to be text/html, which is a horrible bug with security ramifications. This only affects those people still using IE.

The problem gets really bad when the webserver administer is using IE.

If a particular webserver claims to be serving up text/plain files, standards compliant webbrowsers like firefox or opera will display as instructed: As Plain Text. If the webdeveloper is verifying everything with IE, they’ll never notice the problem.

And as a result, clients viewing a particular website in anything other than IE will see html source displayed as plaintext.

The solution is quite simple: Fix your damn webserver, and fork over the right content-type header. You’re pissing off clients and customers, because you’re too ignorant of webstandards to properly configure your webserver. If you’re not responsible for your webserver, find out who is.