Flu report on https://respivirnet.iss.it/

[Lucio Chiappetti]

This not an error report, more a curiosity on a rearrangement of a web site.
The Italian national Higher Health Institute (ISS) since several years publishes, during the flu season, a weekly epidemiologic report. This was in the form of a pdf file.

Now they have changed this. Essentially they replaced the pdf report with an html one (which could be a good thing, there is a choice of different plots). But sich file does not open within the browser.
See the current (first report of the 2025-126 season) page https://respivirnet.iss.it/pagine/rapportoInflunet.aspx and skip to the bottom line. There is a link marked RespiVirNet_2025-43 which, if clicked, displays a popup "you have chosen to open RespiVirNet_2045_43.html which is HTML document. Would you like to save this file ?

For unknown reasons it does not offer the option to DISPLAY the HTML file within the browser.
The only possibility is to save it to a local file, and then open it in the browser, which is rather clumsy.

What is causing this, and canm be overridden to open the file directly within the browser ?

[Moonchild]

It's because the website send the following HTTP headers:

Code: Select all

Content-Disposition:"attachment; filename=RespiVirNet_2025-43.html"
Content-Type:"application/octet-stream"

This explicitly tells the browser to treat the file as a (binary) download /attachment to the document.
You can tell the browser to immediately open it with Pale Moon after downloading, but it will be treated as a download, regardless. That is per standard.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Hmm ... so should I complain to the webmaster, or is there a workaround within the browser ?

For instance for pdf in Preferences->Applications I have four entries for "Adobe Acrobat Dpcument" with four MIME types (application/binary, application/force-download, application/pdf and application/save) and all have action "Always ask" and I can choose to save them, use my preferred viewer (atril) or another viewer. But I can't remember how it was set up.

[adoxa]

I believe you could use moz-rewrite to change the content type.

[Moonchild]

Hmm ... so should I complain to the webmaster, or is there a workaround within the browser ?

It depends on whether it is supposed to be a downloadable document. If yes, then there is nothing to complain about because the webmaster properly marked it as a download.
What you've set as content handlers doesn't matter, because the website explicitly defines it as a downloadable (attachment).

If it's not intended to explicitly be a download, then you could make a point to the webmaster that it's set up in an unintended way.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

I do not see a reason why a document in HTML form should be downloadable only.
Shouldn't application/octet-stream be intended for binary data which would screw up a text-oriented app ?

I assumed this was a mistake so I reported it to the website contact. Let's see.

My reference to PDF which somebody delivers as application/force-download is just an example of a case which (perchance) is "corrected" in the browser.
(Unfortunately as you might know I consider the editing capabilities of Preferences->Applications which Pale Moon has inherited from Firefox as quite limited).

I've noticed sometimes mail attachments (a different context) containing pdf or html are incorrectly sent as application/octet-stream. In my mailer (alpine) I can cause them to be viewed conditionally in an external viewer, just playing with .mailcap and .mime-type, associating a more sensible mime type (text/html or application/pdf) to a file extensions ... my mailer reads the extension from Content-Disposition, find Content-Type in contrast with .mime.type and prompts me whether I would allow to override the content type and use a viewer. It does not do it automatically (which is a good thing, in case of malware faked as something else).

[Moonchild]

I do not see a reason why a document in HTML form should be downloadable only.
Shouldn't application/octet-stream be intended for binary data which would screw up a text-oriented app ?

The main thing here is the content-disposition: attachment header.
There are tons of situations where you would want to explicitly make something a download that would otherwise potentially be opened in the browser or a system application based on MIME type. Think of downloadable invoices (PDF), tabulated data (CSV), plaintext files (TXT). Or ISO disk images, for that matter.
Being able to supply both intended download file and MIME type in headers this way also offers a way to preserve the document type without relying on sniffing or file extensions. If you force downloads via MIME type alone, you wouldn't be able to do that.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say with the last paragraph, but Pale Moon does present the normal download/open with dialog allowing you to make such choices:

Image1.png

[Lucio Chiappetti]

1) There are tons of situations where you would want to explicitly make something a download that would otherwise potentially be opened in the browser or a system application based on MIME type ...
2) I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say with the last paragraph, but Pale Moon does present the normal download/open with dialog allowing you to make such choices:

1) I appreciate that. E.g. I often get zip files with a bunch of bank transactions, or tar.gz file with astronomicla data from RENATER (a file exchange service of the French academic networks). For them I do download them. irrespective of the fact I get a popup similar to your image (save, or use local app or cancel) or to the one I attach (save or cancel)

2) what I was saying in the last paragraph was not relevant to Pale Moon but to my mailer. Its the penultimate paragraph which is relevant to Pale Moon , and for PDF I get a popup similar to your image (and actually I'm quite irritated by the few sites which instead provide a preview in a browser page they generate)

3) but I'm surprised you get the good popup for the flu report, while I get instead this

flu.png

what could be the reason of the different behaviour ? something in my about:config ?

PS: I though they might have fixed it, but I get it like that now (I did not clear the cache though, should I ?)