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category / Code

Writing code is like writing poetry – do it right or you’ll end up in some anthology of shame.

HTTP 404 response causes forced downloads to fail

An interesting gotcha that I stumbled across recently, sending a 404 response code with a download forced by Content-Disposition: attachment will fail but inline content will still be displayed. This behaviour was tested in both Chrome and FireFox. Of course the appropriate response code should always be sent; this 404 response code was being sneaked in by WordPress and led to hours of frustration.