Opera Developer News

ASP.NET sites - Served With The Wrong Mime-Type

By Karl Dubostkarlcow. Friday, August 12, 2011 8:35:51 PM

iis, asp, Microsoft, server, open the web, http, interoperability, mime type, bug

You remember the article I had written about Starbucks solving an error on their server. They were serving HTML with the wrong mime-type to Opera only because of user agent sniffing. They fixed it. They are definitely not the only ones. Other Web sites have exactly the same bad behavior. You may see that there is a pattern. The servers and libraries used are almost always the same.

All these sites and the ones previously solved are into the package OTW-6223. I'm trying to contact each of these sites one by one. It is time consuming with not always a success at the end. Not everyone is as diligent as Rohan Singh (still big respect for him).

if you are a user of this Web site or if you know someone working in the IT department of these companies, please point them to this blog post and ask them to contact me.
If someone from Microsoft is listening, please please please, send a fix to Web developers using ASP.net on their Web sites. I suspect it is a rogue library doing very bad user agent sniffing in ASP.Net. These developers will love you. They will not have to suffer me anymore

Web sites serving HTML as application/xhtml+xml to Opera
Website	HTTP Headers
New York-New York Hotel	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
ASPCA	Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
MGM Grand	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Share Builder	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Logitech	Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 X-AspNetMvc-Version: 2.0 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Sam Shortline Railway	Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
AllHipHop.com	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: PleskWin X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 CommunityServer: 2.0.60217.2664
Car Buyers Guide	Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Responsible Sports	Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Go Army	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Phenomblue	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
P.F. Chang's China Bistro	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
McAfee	Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Excalibur - Las Vegas	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Merrill Edge	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Walmart Money Card	X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-AspNetMvc-Version: 2.0
Nelnet	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Soundview Executive Book Summaries	Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Ella Moss Official Store	X-OS-Node: 22.5.4

YSlow for Opera, out now!SXSW 2012 - 10 proposals

Comments

Unregistered user # Friday, August 12, 2011 10:03:20 PM

Scott Hanselman writes: I run community for ASP.NET. I'll do a post on this. The issue isn't the feature, which is useful, but rather a common Open Source browser library called the MDBF that is use for mobile browser detection. A version of that file had this bug. The project is dead but the file lives on. I'll look into a way to fix it, as deleting browser files removes mobile detection a developer might want. I talked to David Storey about this last year. Feel free to email me also, scottha@. Thanks!

XP1 # Sunday, August 14, 2011 4:28:16 PM

I have encountered a couple more websites recently in the forums:

https://www1.nationalgridus.com/masselectric/YourAccount/Index.aspx

'Document had no style info':
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1062322

---

http://www.micoach.com/

[Site doesn't work] www.micoach.com:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1073352

Karl Dubostkarlcow # Monday, August 15, 2011 2:34:57 AM

Thanks Scott. That is useful information. Any help is more than welcome. A how to fix it guide would be good.

Patrick H. Laukepatrickhlauke # Monday, August 15, 2011 4:24:13 PM

Karl, joining the dots provided by Scott, it's this project (which is now also no longer maintained) http://mdbf.codeplex.com/

Unregistered user # Friday, August 19, 2011 10:39:51 PM

Scott Hanselman writes: Right. If folks don't want to remove that file (they are using the mobile aspects of it) then cain remove all the capability nodes with a name of "preferredRenderingMime" from the mobile.browser file will fix this issue and still allows them to identify mobile browsers. Alternatively they could find the Opera section and replace this node's value with an empty string: <capability name="preferredRenderingMime" value="application/xhtml+xml" />

Димитърskraggy # Friday, October 7, 2011 7:06:07 AM

Too bad it doesn't show page loading time anymore.

Karl Dubostkarlcow # Thursday, October 20, 2011 4:05:06 PM

@skraggy what do you mean?

Swapnil RustagiSwapnil99pro # Tuesday, October 25, 2011 12:22:49 PM

Originally posted by karlcow:

@skraggy what do you mean?

I assure whatever he means is off-topic and unrelated to wrong MIME-type when using Microsoft ASP.NET.

Though what's the issue if using ASP.NET sends XML/XHTML code to Opera. Now, even if XML code contains some minor mistakes that violate well-formedness rules, Opera 12 and above will ignore that and auto-parse it as HTML-

DSK-312074 (Bypass XML parsing failed message by automatically reparsing as HTML)

Karl Dubostkarlcow # Tuesday, October 25, 2011 1:21:00 PM

@swapnil "if XML code contains some minor mistakes that violate well-formedness rules, Opera 12 and above will ignore that and auto-parse it as HTML-" correct.

There is a discussion going on about having a way to configure a strict mode or/and to have a log. Opera 12 is still in alpha, so we are exploring the different solutions.