IE8: opt-out mime sniffing

July 22, 2008 by nxt

According to a recent blog entry on msdn  Microsoft has finally decided to fix a very annoying 'feature' of internet explorer. Mime-sniffing.

 It always irritated me that when I specified a content-type for a web page, Internet Explorer would just look at the content and say: "your wrong" and renders the page the way it thinks you intended.
If I give a html page text/plain as content-type I intend to let it show the source, not render it as html because if I wanted that I would have given it text/html as content-type.

At least in IE8 they allow us to disable the mime sniffing by appending ";authoritative=true" to the content-type header. This way it won't hurt other browsers and we are still able to provide the mime type ourselves.

 

ajax

July 05, 2005 by nxt

I recently discovered Direct Web Remoting.
DWR is a framework wich makes it easy to call serverside code from the client side and allows you to do all kind of cool things. Even though it is still impossible to push information from the server to the client this allows you to build a more rich interface.

for example, if you wanted to update a record in the database through a form, this technology allows you to verify if the new data can be inserted or if the record has been updated by another user without the need to leave the page.
Another example is Google Suggest which provides a list with possible search terms and the amount of results while you type.