[nycbug-talk] html error

[Isaac Levy]

On Nov 4, 2004, at 1:52 PM, Dru wrote:

> You can also download and distribute the advertising flier from
> <a href="http://linux.oreilly.com/news/bsd_ss_flier.pdf"> </a>.
>
> When I go to view the blog, the URL is missing.

Well, it seems that the downloads make the url dissappear in the 
download window, though the file downloads fine here-

I'd suggest adding the following to your <a> tag:

<a href="http://linux.oreilly.com/news/bsd_ss_flier.pdf"
  target="_blank">Link Name</a>

This will make the download pop-up a blank browser window, so at least 
someone doesn't loose the page they were just reading... even though 
it's not javascript, folks hate pop-ups of any kind... so kindof darned 
if you do, darned if you don't...

It'd be much cooler of the ORilley folks would force http headers for 
the relevant download for pdf and other file downloads, so that it 
doesn't go to a browser window at all- in the webserver,  Apache or 
ohterwise, they could set the following:

'Content-Type', 'application/octet-stream'

- and to get fancy, and provide nice download size/time/features etc...,
'Content-Disposition', 'inline; filename=filename.ext'


This would make a browser simply hand the download off to the 
appropriate mechanism, instead of opening it in the browser window.  A 
caveat here with PDF's, is that some windowze' users especially, expect 
PDF files to just open in their browser window like html.  Dumb 
convention in most contexts, IMHO.

This is documented for Apache 1.3 here (what I'd assume ORilley is 
running):
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/content-negotiation.html


Rocket-
.ike