Links to *.ppsx and *.pptx on Web won't open

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To follow up on this:

I downloaded your PPTX file and posted it temporarily to my own web site.
As it happens, my site and yours both run under Sun OS and Apache web server.
The result was pretty much the same at this end ... MSIE wants to download the PPTX
as a ZIP file.

I emailed the ISP and asked them to change the media type/MIME config on the web
server to reflect the new extensions for Office 2007; as soon as I heard back that
the fix was in place, I went back to the same link and voila, it offers me the
choice of downloading as PPTX or opening (and if I choose Open, it opens into
PowerPoint.)

So again, it's a web server issue.
Click to expand...
Hi Steve

Would you mind answering a bit of a blonde question for me? Why did it work
fine with Firefox?

Lucy
 
Lucy Thomson (aka said:
:


Hi Steve

Would you mind answering a bit of a blonde question for me? Why did it work
fine with Firefox?
Click to expand...

Not blonde at all. The question, that is.

Which "it"? Downloading the file AS pptx or Opening?

But either way, what's happening is something like this:

Arlene's server doesn't know what a .PPTX or .PPSX is so it just shovels out the bytes,
telling the browser "Here. It's text." Or in the case of my ISP before the change,
"Here. A big bag of bytes. YOU work it out."

MSIE seems to read the first few bytes of the file to see if it has a recognizeable
"signature" (many file types start with a unique series of bytes). If it works out that
"Hey, this is no ORDINARY bag o' bytes, this is a ZIP file" it offers to download it as
such.

Sometimes this might be helpful but on the whole, it's an intrusive behavior, IMO.

And in this case, it's screwing up royally. Yes, it IS a zip file, but only because
Office 2007 files use zips to package up all the XML bits that make up an Office file.
Nobody asked it to change the file's extension, and in doing so, it's made life more
difficult for us.
 
Thanks Mr Knowledge :-)

Still seems odd to me that microsoft's own browser can't recognise the pptx
isn't a zip (or rather is a particular kind of zip), but firefox can. But
then many things seem odd to me.

Lucy
 
Lucy Thomson said:
Thanks Mr Knowledge :-)

Still seems odd to me that microsoft's own browser can't recognise the pptx
isn't a zip (or rather is a particular kind of zip), but firefox can.
Click to expand...

It's the other way 'round, y'see.

Firefox just accepts it as a bag of bytes that it has no idea what to do with.
IE works out that it's a zip.

Then outsmarts itself, trips, falls ....
 
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