Why is Internet Explorer not showing PDF or VRML samples?
There are at least three distinct bugs involved here. The first is a HTTP glitch in Cocoon which triggers a second bug in IE. This has been fixed in Cocoon 1.8.1, so first make sure you are using Cocoon 1.8.1 or higher. The third is a long-time problem with Internet Explorer which doesn’t look for the MIME type sent by the HTTP response, but instead just looks at the file extension at the end of the URL to determine what program should open it (unlike other browsers which are smarter and follow the Internet standards correctly). There is a trick that forces IE to treat it as a PDF – adding ?dummy=test.pdf (or some similar parameter ending in .pdf) at the end of your URI. Cocoon should ignore this, but IE won’t, and will trigger the correct plugin/application for that content. Russ Whyte has also developed a simple servlet workaround which should work for any browser; however this is slightly less efficient because it requires a “servlet chain”. With Cocoon 1.8.1 and above, it should no
