git ssb

title: "Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types" date: 2004-02-19 15:30 status: published tags: Moo­quack­woof­tweet­meow, Freewebs, XHTML, web standards, Internet Explorer, MIME types, the Web

<p>
Freewebs is obviously designed to cater for “webmasters” who've never heard of Jeffrey Zeldman... Like most, if not all, free web hosts, Freewebs use filename “extensions” to determine what MIME type to serve for a file; this is OK, until they get it wrong. Granted, Atom and XSL aren't the most commonly used file formats on the web but nonetheless Freewebs could bother serving them with the proper MIME types. </p>
<p>
A few months ago, I asked them if they could serve .xhtml files as XHTML rather than plain text. They responded by saying they wanted to comply with web standards; could I please send them the reference to the W3C recommendation. Great! ...except that nothing's happened since (or at least they haven't told me about it if anything has) - a couple of weeks ago I checked and .xhtml files were still being served as plain text. </p>
<p>
I'd appeal to Freewebs now, except I suspect they use Internet Explorer, and thus won't be able to read this... </p>