Book: I believe I just... I think I'm on the wrong ship. Inara: Maybe. Or maybe you're exactly where you ought to be.

'Serenity'


Buffistas Building a Better Board  

Do you have problems, concerns or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.

To-do list


John H - Dec 29, 2002 2:43:06 pm PST #2451 of 10000

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.


John H - Dec 29, 2002 2:46:27 pm PST #2452 of 10000

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?


John H - Dec 29, 2002 2:50:10 pm PST #2453 of 10000

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?


askye - Dec 29, 2002 3:00:05 pm PST #2454 of 10000
Thrive to spite them

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.


Jon B. - Dec 29, 2002 4:07:12 pm PST #2455 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

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.


esse - Dec 29, 2002 4:47:12 pm PST #2456 of 10000
S to the A -- using they/them pronouns!

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

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


John H - Dec 29, 2002 4:58:53 pm PST #2457 of 10000

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.


Jon B. - Dec 29, 2002 5:01:51 pm PST #2458 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

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... :)


Sophia Brooks - Dec 29, 2002 6:29:41 pm PST #2459 of 10000
Cats to become a rabbit should gather immediately now here

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?


John H - Dec 29, 2002 7:12:14 pm PST #2460 of 10000

The two options are

    • you see the thread as a very long page in your browser, and then you save it to disk using the File menu and "Save As" or whatever
  1. instead of seeing the thread, that little box comes up which comes up when you download software, which says "what shall I do with this file?" and you choose "save it to disk" which means that it could chug away quietly downloading in the background, without having to be displayed