[Haskell-cafe] [Off-topic] Loss of humour

[Miguel Mitrofanov]

On 24 Jul 2008, at 00:45, Andrew Coppin wrote:

> Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
>>> Also... the current Humour page on the Haskell wiki contains a  
>>> link to Lambdabot's quotes database, but on my system, clicking  
>>> this link just displays a few hundred pages of gibberish. Is this  
>>> normal?
>>
>> Of course it's not. But deciphering is very simple, it's named  
>> "gunzip".
>
> Right... so why does it have the MIME type "text/plain"? o_O

Probably because it should be in "Content-Encoding" header.

See, most web browsers are capable of gunzipping content - but only if  
they know it's gzipped, so they look at the Content-Encoding header,  
and if it's present and says "gzip", it decompresses the content. This  
is perfectly safe, since before receiving content browser lets the  
server know it accepts compressed pages (by sending "Accept-Encoding"  
header), so the server knows it can send compressed content.

> (Also... how do you know it's ZIP, and not, say, gzip, bz2, RAR,  
> LHA...? I can't see anything that looks like an identifying header  
> in there.)

Hmmm... your "file" tool doesn't know about gzip archives?