Why does my web server rename a .xlsx file to .zip?

A friend called me with a trivial problem he was having on his web server. He wanted to offer a excel document for download and some of his users pointed out that the document's file name extension was always changed to .ZIP when they were downloading the file. He did some research and found out that it was browser dependent. Firefox did save it as .xlsx while IE and Opera did not.

MIME Types

I instantly knew that this was a mime type problem. A Office .xslx or .docx document IS actually a .zip archive that holds a number of files, according to the OpenXML specification. Web servers like Apache have some magic implemented to determine the mime type when no one had been set for a given file name extension. Because of this, the server identifies the document as a .zip file, because the configuration did not tell it about the existence of  Office file formats (technically, this is perfectly ok, but it is not what the user expects) and returns it as .zip archive.

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How do you deal with JavaScript?

A couple of days ago, I had one of these discussion with a good friend, who is - like myself - a typical "IT guy". Many of his opinions can be seen as fairly "old school", but he does have a lot of experience, particularly with network security and the evils of the Internet. I would say, he is a highly qualified expert in that area and he certainly knows his stuff.

While browsing my site, he noticed that it recently has become quite heavy on JavaScript with all the things I integrated, particularly the colorbox script, the syntax highlighter and some jQuery stuff. I know, he is not a fan of script heavy sites at all and he prefers to surf the net with JavaScript disabled by default.

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There are these days...

... where you sit down with a cup of fresh coffee in the morning, checking your mails, reading the news and suddenly - between all the ever repeating madness and daily routine - you find something that actually makes you think. It's like a punch in the face, telling you - hey, that guy does have a point, and a strong one.

Logging into my WordPress admin area, I found a post by Matt (WordPress) in my dashboard that awoke my interest. The title alone - I Don’t Care if You Read This Article - made me think twice. Really? Who should think this way and why?

Heading over to the original article (Matt's post was just a short excerpt), I found a fantastic read, an article so full of truth that you simply cannot ignore it, especially not if you find a part of your own past in that short essay.

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