[vox-tech] Question: mod_dav.1.0.3 + apache.1.3.26 and CR/LF issues w/ MacOS+MSWin

[Jeff Newmiller]

On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, ME wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Jeff Newmiller wrote:
> > I am only now learning about WebDAV, but since it is built on http, it
> > ought to be as interoperable as http is, so something seems odd about
> > this.
> > 
> > To be specific, I _thought_ there was a standard for on-the-wire text
> > files through http... CRLF format, and clients were supposed to be
> > responsible for translating to and from their own formats.  Is there
> > something systemically wrong with all these clients, or is the ContentType
> > header just not set right?
> 
> Web browsers seem to do this. However, when testing "MS Web Folders" and
> "Cadaver" I have found they transmit the files with the actual
> line termination encoding of the file.

So, if the on-the-wire format is supposed to be CRLF, which is native to
Windows, and your server is not storing that as LF, then either the
transmitted content type is wrong, or the server is not configured
or programmed correctly.

This sounds vaguely like the reverse of the Netscape Communicator "MSWin
bug". NS has a habit of believing the server's content-type, so
downloading a binary file from a *nix web server that has not been told
the file is binary will yield an on-the wire corrupted file.  A *nix
Netscape client will fortuitously un-corrupt the file, but an MSWin or Mac
NS Communicator yields corrupt downloads because it believes the file is
text.  MSIE second-guesses the content-type, and usually downloads the
file correctly.

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