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Joan Bondira (jbondira -at- reesebros -dot- com) asks:
> I'm trying to build a web-based document library, and I want one of
> those download boxes to open when a user clicks a button next to a
> listed file. Can anyone tell me how to accomplish this? Can
> JavaScript do it, or do I need something else?
Strictly speaking there's no way to do this; the feature you're
talking about is not a javascript feature or like the HTML upload tag,
it's a convenience in the way your browser handles certain mime types.
Specifically, when your browser sends a request to a server, the server
responds with a set of headers, including a content-type header that
describes what the content (the part that comes after the headers)
will contain.
Your browser interprets the content-type header and based on
that, decides what to do with the content - display it in a page,
launch it in a helper application, or lacking one of the above, offer
to save it to a file for you. That's where that pop-up comes in.
It's interesting to note, however, that Internet Explorer reportedly
sometimes ignores the mime-type if it recognizes the data type on its
own (i.e. a microsoft word file).
Some common mime-types are text/plain (for text files), text/html
(for web pages), image/gif, image/jpeg, application/pdf. A mime type
that very often causes the "save as" dialog to pop up in IE is
application/octet-stream, indicating binary data.
An interesting looking table of different mime types is at:
Just for background, it's interesting to note that the requests
and responses that browsers and http servers push back and forth are
based on mime-encoding. Loosely, each request or response is a set of
headers and data, MIME-style. MIME was invented for internet mail to
support the capability to push a wide variety of types of files around
(prior to that, all mail was either plain text, or plain text
containing uuencoded (i.e. text-ified) shar files).
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