posted on Tuesday, September 07, 2004 9:29 PM
by
scotts
Compatibility in IE6 for XP sp2
I came across a small bug introduced into one of my applications today due to a change in behavior with IE6 file uploads after installing XP sp2. The application in question allows “forms” of different MIME types to be uploaded to a server (i.e. pdf, word, html) for later processing. I store the MIME ContentType along with the file, and then later use the MIME ContentType within a factory pattern to determine which type of processing object is instantiated to process the document. Previously, when uploading .htm documents to the server, the included MIME ContentType of the posted file would be “text/html”. Now (after XP sp2), the .htm files posted content type is “text/plain”.
Apparently IE was previously “promoting” the uploaded .htm files from text/plain to text/html because it could recognize the html code within the text. IE with XP sp2 will no longer promote files from text/plain to text/html using (something called MIME sniffing).
Anyway, when searching around for the explanation, I came across this document that I thought was a pretty informational read on the compatibility differences with IE6 for XP sp2: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/XpSp2Compat.asp