The decision whether to open in place or save to disk based on MIME type is
up to the browser. For example, I set my browsers to ask to save to disk
application/pdf documents (rather than opening them with Adobe Acrobat's
problem plugin). A MIME type of text/plain (without any specification of
encoding) is correct (and expected by any mainstream browser) for text
files. Opera opens those by default but can be set to do any one of a
variety of tasks when encountering text/plain. All mainstream browsers also
include encoding autodetection routines which may or may not fail depending
on your file's contents. All mainstream browsers also allow you to select
an encoding to decode and view your document in.
Assuming the right bytes arrive at your client it is always possible to
read the file in the right encoding. The encoding specified in response
header has no say in the bytes that are transmitted.
If your "any browser" includes Opera try Preferences > Advanced > Downloads
(Uncheck "Hide file types opened with Opera") > Quick Search text/plain >
Edit > Action: Open with Opera (if the setting has been altered). Then
retry visiting your remote file. Even if response header contains the wrong
encoding (ISO-8859-1, EUC-KR, whatever) or no encoding specification at all
Opera should retrieve the document and display it. If the display is wrong,
try View > Encoding > Unicode > UTF-8.
The behavior you describe of "having to download the file" and "characters
being garbled" is not "any browser" sort of behavior. Neither Opera, nor
Firefox, nor Chrome display such behavior for the example I have supplied
below.
If all else fails... why not wget -S [URI] and check (and probably post)
the response header?
This resource, for example:
<http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=66&id=3&mode=txt>
results in this response header:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:45:56 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.8-pl2-gentoo
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain
And there's no problem whatsoever with its display in either Opera, Chrome,
or Firefox. Opera Info Panel says, by the way:
Encoding (used by Opera):
- not supplied - (windows-1252)
--On Sunday, October 18, 2009 20:34 -0400 Akshat Kumar
<aku...@mail.nanosouffle.net> wrote:
I'm trying to put up a plain text file containing UTF-8
characters from httpd, but when viewing it from any
browser, it comes off as an ASCII file that needs to
be downloaded (so, those characters are garbled).
Is this due to some behaviour of httpd?
ak
