It's a MIME/browser combination. Opera tends to display more things than IE.

I suspect MIME is involved.

Oh yeah, I'm sure that's what's going on, but I don't know how difficult it is to set the headers for outgoing files.

I know for instance that when you're doing this in Perl, you get to set the MIME type specifically, like you write:

Content-type: text/html

in your script. So if you wanted to change that to:

Content-type: application/zip

for a zip file, you can do it easily.

But if it's not a zip file, it really is a text/html file, but we want to try and trick the browser into handling it differently? Hmmm.

Also that kind of thing, making the headers explicit, is exactly the reason why people use PHP instead of Perl, so that you don't have to do that.

I might research this a little.

OK you can set whatever damn headers you want with the PHP header() function: [link] but that doesn't solve the force-download problem, does it?

Soy and Linseed Toast and Vegemite:

Here's a little thread on the subject in alt.php -- seems eminently possible, despite various annoying browsers quirks and irregularities. Who'd have thought?

I thought we picked MARCIE after Marcie the ignored Invisible Girl. A Buffy in joke thing, not just a Buffista in joke. I think a few people wanted to make MARCIE an acronym for something, but I think it was just a name being turned into a verb, the same way we started using Nilly and meara. This could easily be explained in the FAQ.

I know, when I first started on Table Talk, I didn't know what the ENUF filter was or how it worked, I had to go investigate that.

Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't want the default action to be "Download", rather than "Display", and therefore I wouldn't want it to be zipped up either. It's simpler to save something that's already displayed than vice versa. Also, once I've sucked a thread, I like to look at what I've got to make sure it's what I want.

I thought we picked MARCIE after Marcie the ignored Invisible Girl.

We did. Though someone came up with a nice explanation for it.

someone came up with a nice explanation for it.

Someone else came up with one I can't remember but I know it used "In Extremis" for the I and E.

My humble contribution was that it stands for the "Making Antagonistic Respondents Completely Invisible" Extension.

I wouldn't want the default action to be "Download"

Agreed. It's an option that users, if they wanted, would have to explicitly choose, because it's kind of the experts' version.

Agreed. It's an option that users, if they wanted, would have to explicitly choose, because it's kind of the experts' version.

So, something that could certainly wait for version 2.0... :)

I am not being facetious, but as a non-techno person, I don't understand what a threadsuck would be if it wasn't downloading the thread to my computer so I could read off-line? What is the other option?