RE: How to use mime types for excel?

[Siegfried Heintze]

Cannot I just check for the mime-types supported by the browser (by checking
ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT}) and conditionally set the content type to
application/msexcel? Incidently, I discovered that this mime type works and
excel automatically converts the HTML to excel tables.

What is confusing me, however, is that when I enumerate the environment
variables, I see application/vnd.ms-excel (which does not work) and not
application/msexcel (which does work).

Thanks,
Siegfried


>-Original Message-
>From: David Dorward,,, [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Dorward
>Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 2:17 PM
>To: beginners-cgi@perl.org
>Subject: Re: How to use mime types for excel?
>
>On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 02:06:42PM -0600, Siegfried Heintze wrote:
>> I saw a very simple demonstration last night (at the Boulder Java users
>> group) where Scott Davis showed a very simple java server pages program
that
>> transmitted HTML table data to a browser resident instance of Microsoft
>> Excel. IE automatically looked at the mime types and invoked MS Excell to
>> convert the HTML to a spreadsheet.
>
>Don't do that. You've no idea what software the end user will be
>using, so if you lie and claim that an HTML document is really an
>Excel document then you can cause problems for people.
>
>If you want to generate Excel, then Perl has many fine modules to do
>just that.
>
>(At a wild guess I'd say that perhaps you were encountering the IE
>knows the Content-Type better then the server issue, and it was
>realising that you Excel document was really an HTML document and
>doing The "Right" Thing).
> 
>-- 
>David Dorward  http://dorward.me.uk
>
>


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Re: How to use mime types for excel?

[David Dorward]

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 02:06:42PM -0600, Siegfried Heintze wrote:
> I saw a very simple demonstration last night (at the Boulder Java users
> group) where Scott Davis showed a very simple java server pages program that
> transmitted HTML table data to a browser resident instance of Microsoft
> Excel. IE automatically looked at the mime types and invoked MS Excell to
> convert the HTML to a spreadsheet.

Don't do that. You've no idea what software the end user will be
using, so if you lie and claim that an HTML document is really an
Excel document then you can cause problems for people.

If you want to generate Excel, then Perl has many fine modules to do
just that.

(At a wild guess I'd say that perhaps you were encountering the IE
knows the Content-Type better then the server issue, and it was
realising that you Excel document was really an HTML document and
doing The "Right" Thing).
 
-- 
David Dorward  http://dorward.me.uk




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