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252

Chapter 11 The JSP page Directive: Structuring Generated Servlets

Use of the 

contentType

 attribute takes one of the following two forms:

     <%@ page contentType="MIME Type" %>

     <%@ page contentType="MIME Type; charset=Character Set" %>

For example, the directive 

     <%@ page contentType="text/plain" %>

has the same effect as the scriptlet

     <% response.setContentType("text/plain"); %> 

Unlike regular servlets, where the default MIME type is 

text/plain

, the

default for JSP pages is 

text/html

 (with a default character set of

ISO 8859 1

).

Generating Plain Text Documents

Listing 11.2 shows a document that appears to be HTML but has a 

content 

Type

 of 

text/plain

. Strictly speaking, browsers are supposed to display the

raw HTML content in such a case, as shown in Netscape in Figure 11 3.

Internet Explorer, however, interprets the document as though it were of

type 

text/html

, as shown in Figure 11 4. 

Listing 11.2 ContentType.jsp 

The contentType Attribute

<%@ page contentType="text/plain" %>

This should be rendered as plain text,

not as HTML.

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