Musings

Instiki + IE7

Somehow (doubtless, because I try to stay as far away from Windows as possible), it eluded my attention that there was a serious bug when viewing Instiki pages in IE7+MathPlayer. The problem doesn’t occur with IE8β+Mathplayer or, as best I can recall, with IE6+MathPlayer. But, with IE7, instead of displaying the page, it showed you the XML source tree instead.

The problem turns out to be involve the HTTP Content-Type header. If you send IE7+MathPlayer the header

Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8

you trigger the bug. If, instead, you omit the charset parameter,

Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml

all is well.

Getting Rails to omit the charset parameter turns out to be surprisingly difficult. If you want to see how to do it, search for “MathPlayer” in this file.

Technical details aside, the latest version of Instiki finally works with IE7+MathPlayer.

Thanks to Timm Wrase for reporting the problem (best of luck in Munich, Timm!), Neil Soiffer for confirming its origin, and Sam Ruby for working to ensure that Rails 2.2 will solve the problem in a less convoluted way.