content-type: application/octet-stream means "Well, uh, its some bytes". Not recomended for Word documents, for which the correct content type is: application/msword.

Sometimes people use octet-stream to prompt user agents to save the file rather then opening it, but the correct way to handle that is via the content-disposition header.

In reply to Re^2: how do i open a word doc? by dorward
in thread how do i open a word doc? by Anonymous Monk

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