Node JS Proper Content-Type for responses

Is there a reason that I sh开发者_如何学JAVAould not be sending my content-type as binary for everything? I am a bit naive about proper http but it seems to work for everything. What are some of the pitfalls I will run into working this way?

If you send a stylesheet as Content Type binary, IE9 won't render it. It refuses to render any stylesheet that isn't text/css. That's probably enough to keep people from not visiting your site with IE9.

Not to mention the other benefits like the browser handling specific content types differently based on user preferences.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/03/27/http-406-not-acceptable-php-ie9-standards-mode-accepts-only-text_2f00_css-for-stylesheets.aspx

Edit Here, you can use this, it will make it easier to determine the content type. The module will have two methods. getExt and getContentType. If you pass the extension to getContentType it will return the Content-Type for that file. I'm not the one that compiled all the content types, unfortunately I forgot where I found it...

https://gist.github.com/976610

If you specify the right content-type, the application/browser requesting the file can handle it properly

For example, if You're downloading a pdf file, the browser knows how to handle the content type "application/pdf" and will open the file directly in the browser, if it doesn't know the type, it will just ask you to download the file

Browser also let you specify a specific program from which you can open a specific type of file, for example, if you download a torrent file, you can tell your browser to open it with uTorrent, and the next time a torrent file is downloaded it will be also opened with uTorrent directly

In Node.js, you can get the content type of a file doing the following:

type = require('mime').lookup(path);