Re: Local Chime

Dave Houldershaw (pps2@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk)
Fri, 26 Jun 1998 11:01:37 +0100

Hi Bernard,
This looks like a MIME-type stamping problem. When files are passed through
the server they are identified by their extension (eg .pdb) and are stamped
accordingly, that is, a couple of lines of text are prepended to the file that
identify it as a particular sort of file, this text is then used by the browser
to interpret the file. For example, our script that sends out pdb files will
first prepend to the pdb file the text "content-type: chemical/x-pdb" followed
by two blank lines (why the blank lines are necessary I don't know, but they
are). The browser then looks up "chemical/x-pdb" in it's list of know types and
fires up the appropiate application.

You could try manually stamping the files yourself (but remember to take out the
stamp before transferring them to the server!) and hopefully Netscape is
intelligent enough to recognise whats going on, otherwise your solution of
putting the files on the server first seems the only way around the problem.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Dave H.

Bernard M. Debono wrote:
>
> Dear David,
>
> Chime is giving me some trouble.
>
> I have absolutely no problem using it when I am online. When I create
> local *.htm files, I ensure that the *.pdb files are in the same local
> directory. When Netscape 4.04 (on Win95) loads this file, instead of the
> image I get the "jigsaw puzzle" sign and it offers me to retrieve the
> plug-in for me. When I transfer the file and the necessary *.pdbs to my
> web-server, everything works just fine.
>
> Can you help?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Bernard Debono