Resource interpreted as Document but transferred with MIME type application/zip

Question

You can specify the HTML5 download attribute in your <a> tag.

<a href="http://example.com/archive.zip" download>Export</a>

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#attr-download

In your request header, you have sent Content-Type: text/html which means that you'd like to interpret the response as HTML. Now if even server send you PDF files, your browser tries to understand it as HTML. That's the problem. I'm searching to see what the reason could be. :)

I could not find anywhere just an explanation of the message by itself. Here is my interpretation.

As far as I understand, Chrome was expecting some material it could possibly display (a document), but it obtained something it could not display (or something it was told not to display).

This is both a question of how the document was declared at the HTML page level in href (see the download attribute in Roy's message) and how it is declared within the server's answer by the means of HTTP headers (in particular Content-Disposition). This is a question of contract, as opposed to hope and expectation.

To continue on Evan's way, I've experienced that:

Content-type: application/pdf
Content-disposition: attachment; filename=some.pdf

is just inconsistent with:

<a href='some.pdf'>

Chrome will cry Resource interpreted as document but transferred…

Actually, the attachment disposition just means this: the browser shall not interpret the link, but rather store it somewhere for other—hidden—purposes. Here above, either download is missing beside href, or Content-disposition must be removed from the headers. It depends on whether we want the browser to render the document or not.

Hope this helps.

I experienced this problem when serving up a PDF file (MIME type application/pdf) and solved it by setting the Content-Disposition header, e.g.:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foo.pdf

Hope that helps.

I've fixed this…by simply opening a new tab.

Why it wasn't working I'm not entirely sure, but it could have something to do with how Chrome deals with multiple downloads on a page, perhaps it thought they were spam and just ignored them.