I got a summer internship that involves processing a huge amounts of public interventions from a government regulatory body. That involves opening up these individual web pages, reading the (usually 1-2 sentence long) pitch, and then parsing the substantive from the form letters/junk. 5000+ pages, I’m going to be at this for a few days.
Problem is, every page I try to open–despite being an HTML file–gives me this prompt:
It does this on every browser, in various forms, and actually clicking it to make it open the HTML file in a seperate window takes about 3-4 seconds on my computer. I suck at math, but it feels like I’m wasting a lot of time doing that, especially for the chaff reports that I don’t enter into the spreadsheet. I may have to do it for another file, so if I’m doing 10-20k times over the summer, I’d like to cut any corners that I can.
Can I make it just…go away? Automatically open the thing without prompting me? Any other solutions?
Well, it’s close. In this case, however, what I want it to do is actually open the page. I don’t really want to download 5,000, and then manually open them.
Some of the submissions are in .doc or .pdf, but that vast vast majority are HTML files. I’m in fact not even sure why these HTML files are somehow different than the HTML files that say, are displaying the message board you and I are conversing on right now…
I imagine that they aren’t opening because they aren’t coded on the page displaying them as a link - but there probably isn’t anything you can do about that.
You could try setting the security settings in your browser to the lowest, least secure option. Of course, you’ll want to set them back up before you go to any site out in the wild.
Even that doesn’t seem to outright eliminate the prompt.
Of all the browsers so far, Firefox seems to have the least annoying option with a dialogue Window. Safari on iPad actually just OPENS the page, but it’s slower to use my fingers than a mouse and keyboard alt F4. Argh!
So, I take it these files are on an actual website, since you report being able to open them on an iPad? If it were local, I’d just recommend avoiding all the hoopla and loading the files in Word or something. Since Word won’t open JavaScript, it shouldn’t need to warn you.
But if it’s an actual website, it sounds like there’s a problem on their end–they’ve got the server set up where it forces the files to be downloaded. On any modern web browser, that means that it will prompt you on whether to download it, no matter how many times you tell it to always download. It’s intended as a way to override the default behavior, usually for important files. (For example, it’s really useful to make you download an MP3 you bought, instead of having it play in your browser, and possibly not saving it.)
Since you mention using Firefox, I do have a possible solution: the InlineDisposition addon. If the server is set up the way I think it is, that should fix the problem.
EDIT: I’d be more sure of myself if you’d shown a screenshot of the Firefox error message. Please do that if this doesn’t work. I’m most familiar with that web browser.
The above won’t work if the server is actually lying about what type of file it is, which is another way to force a download. If that’s the case, the Force Content Type addon may help.
Setting it up for your specific site would might be a bit tricky if you aren’t used to regular expressions, so feel free to ask for help, via PM if necessary (if you don’t want to reveal the site address in public.)
The web server is responsible for telling the client (browser) what type of file it is… the file extension “.html” is actually ignored by all modern browsers (although IE used to respect them.)
So the problem here is really out-of-your-hand-- whoever set up the web server is either not setting a MIME type on those .html files, or setting the incorrect MIME type (say: “application/binary” instead of “text/html”) causing the browser to believe the file is intended to be downloaded.
If anyone cares, this is resolved now. We had to use both addons I recommended to get it to work. The “fake” MIME type was application/octet-stream, a really common one that just means digital file, basically.
Thought it would be good to leave this information just in case someone else stumbled upon this thread.
