Re: [Visualpython-users] Linux users of VPython, unite!

[Ari H. <ahe...@an...>]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 11:59:35AM -0400, Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> This is very strange. The download on Windows (using Internet Explorer) 
> automatically unzips the file, but doesn't remove the gz extension. So you 
> end up with a working file, but the wrong extension.
> 
> I was unaware that IE would/could automatically unzip a .gz file during 
> download? It doesn't do this with .zip files.
> 
It's a general bug of stupid web browsers. Netscape does it too.

A long time ago someone said "why don't we gzip all html content? that will
make download a lot faster". This was an excellent idea and browsers
implemented support for it -- and they recognize the content by its gzip
header (in the data) rather than its extension, since for some reason they
expected the HTML files to still have a .html extension (even though they
were zipped).

No one actually ever zipped any html files.

And now all web browsers mangle .gz files on download, uncompressing them
without changing their extension to indicate their uncompressed type.


ari