Looks like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will accept any format a web server is willing to give it.
This doesn’t play nicely with Rails’ 2.0+ respond_to feature. A slick little bit of code that asks the browser what it wants and replies accordingly.
Here’s a conversation between Rails & Firefox
Firefox: “Hey Rails, I want this url”
Rails: “No problem, which format would you like it in?”
Firefox: “HTML, please.”
Rails: “Here you go.”
Here’s the same conversation with Internet Explorer
IE: “Hey Rails, I want this url”
Rails: “No problem, which format would you like it in?”
IE: “Whatcha got?”
Rails: “I’ve got Atom, and…”
IE: (interputting) “OK THANKS!”
Rails: “…um, what? I wasn’t finished, really? ok, here you go.”
I had ordered my code alphabetically, so ‘atom‘ came before ‘html‘, like this:
respond_to do |format|
format.atom
format.html
…
end
Because IE is so, um, accepting, I’ve needed to put ‘html‘ first:
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.atom
…
end
For more on this issue: