Website: 'NEWS' tab causes download

[njh]

When I click on the 'NEWS' tab on the check website, in Chrome on Mac OS X, it causes it to download the file instead of viewing it.

Fetching the page with curl shows that the MIME type is 'application/octet-stream'.

$ curl -v 'http://libcheck.github.io/check/NEWS'
*   Trying 185.31.19.133...
* Connected to libcheck.github.io (185.31.19.133) port 80 (#0)
> GET /check/NEWS HTTP/1.1
> Host: libcheck.github.io
> User-Agent: curl/7.44.0
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server: GitHub.com
< Content-Type: application/octet-stream
< Last-Modified: Thu, 24 Dec 2015 22:16:38 GMT
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
< Expires: Fri, 25 Dec 2015 23:53:16 GMT
< Cache-Control: max-age=600
< X-GitHub-Request-Id: B91F1319:2F47:22CE40CE:567DD493
< Content-Length: 20291
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2015 23:43:16 GMT
< Via: 1.1 varnish
< Age: 0
< Connection: keep-alive
< X-Served-By: cache-lhr6333-LHR
< X-Cache: MISS
< X-Cache-Hits: 0
< X-Timer: S1451086996.058975,VS0,VE197
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< X-Fastly-Request-ID: b7683b36740a99519ba7343452e15b5ffceae2c4
< 

[brarcher]

Well, that stinks. The same thing happens with the LGPL license, and also on other browsers besides Chrome.

According to this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15951012/can-mime-types-of-github-pages-files-be-configured

it seems that GitHub is unable to determine the mimetype of the files because they do not have an extension, and fall back to application/octet-stream.

I attempted to set the target of the link to open in a new browser tab, hoping that this would convince a browser to not download the file.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_target.asp

However, the browser still downloaded the file. Example here:

http://brarcher.github.io/check/

Without adding the extension of these files, I'm not sure of a way to resolve this, as the issue is on GitHub's side.

[ladar]

I believe there is a way. You can create a .gitattributes file, and then specify which files, like NEWS, etc, are in fact text files, and not binary blobs. See this URL for details on the syntax:

https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/gitattributes.txt

I should note that I spent quite a bit of time trying to use the .gitattribtes file to force GitHub into displaying my project README file as Markdown. The attributes were respected when I viewed the individual file, but I never could get it to render the style information on the project page.

That's a long way of saying, your mileage may vary.