Since this is for DSpace, one option might be to just pass the Content-Type
and Content-Disposition headers to force specific file types to prompt as
needing to be saved.  This usually gives the user an option to just open,
and that will force the file to be downloaded and opened within the default
viewer associated with the file type.  I know that in early versions of
DSpace (not sure if this still occurs), something like this was done for
PDFs to fix an issue some browsers had serving large PDF files and rendering
them in-line.  

--tr

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joe
Hourcle
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2014 11:45 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Requesting a Little IE Assistance

It sounds like the issue already has a solution, but ...



On Oct 13, 2014, at 10:13 PM, Matthew Sherman wrote:

> The DSpace angle also complicates things a bit as they do not have any 
> built in CSS that I could edit for this purpose.  I am hoping they 
> will be amenable to the suggestions to right click and open in notepad 
> because txt files are darn preservation friendly and readable with 
> almost anything since they are some of the simplest files in 
> computing.  Thanks for the input folks.


I'm not a DSpace user, but my understanding is that it's not a stand-alone
webserver ... which means that you may still have ways to re-write what gets
served out of it.

For instance, if you're running Apache you can build an 'output filter'.

I've only done them via mod_perl, but some quick research points to
mod_ext_filter to call any command as a filter: 
	http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_ext_filter.html

You'd then set up a 'smart filter' to trigger this when you had a text/plain
response and the UserAgent is IE ... but the syntax is ... complex, to put
it nicely:

	http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_filter.html

(I've never configured a smart filter myself, and searching for useful
examples isn't really panning out for me).

... but I thought I'd mention this as an option for anyone who might have
similar problems in the future, as it lets you mess with images and other
types of content, too.

-Joe