Of BinHex, Netscape, and Automatic Recognition

Mark Coniglio (troika@panix.com)
Fri, 22 Mar 1996 09:27:51 -0500

Hello Artist Comrades!

I am having a problem with getting Netscape to recognize BinHex (.hqx)
files from www.art.net. (BinHex, for the non-Mac inclined, is a encoding
scheme that allows you to repesent binary files in text only documents --
similar to uuencode.)

At sites other than Art on the Net, when I click on an .hqx file Netscape
recogizes it as a BinHex file, and sends it off to StuffIt expander to be
converted. When I try to download .hqx files from Art on the Net, Netscape
just displays them as if they were text, apparently unaware that they are
BinHex.

As far as Netscape goes, I have the follow line in the helper application
section:

Mime Type Application Action Extensions
application/mac-binhex40 -- StuffitExpander -- Launch -- hqx, .hqx

so you would think that Netscape would see the hqx at the end and know what
to do.

Is there some kind of MIME encoding information that needs to be sent by
the server to make this work? Am I doing something wrong when uploading the
documents?

Any ideas, thoughts, or help appreciated...

Thanks,
Mark

P.S. If you would like to try, there is a very short .hqx file at

http://www.art.net/~troika/a2d.sit.hqx

================================================================
Mark Coniglio, Artistic Co-Director | troika@panix.com
Troika Ranch | http://www.art.net/~troika
================================================================