Serving Documents from Mac Applications In addition to serving documents like HTML and GIF files, MacHTTP can serve documents from many other types of Mac applications with a few caveats: * Documents must contain all of their data in the data fork of the Mac file. * Suffix mappings must be defined for the documents that cause them to be sent as binary files (more below). * The documents will not be viewable by users on other machines that don't possess applications capable of reading the Mac files. Configuring MacHTTP to Serve Mac Documents There is only one real configuration issue on the MacHTTP side of things to contend with. You must make sure your Mac documents (e.g, Word, Excel) are named with a suffix that is defined in the MacHTTP.config file as BINARY. You are limited to only 10 suffix definitions, so you may need to redefine some that you aren't using. Here's an example. Suppose you have an Excel spreadsheet file called "BigBucks.xcl". You must make sure that there is an entry in the MacHTTP.config file that looks like: BINARY .xcl This tells MacHTTP to transfer files with names ending in ".xcl" to the WWW client without any modifications. Configuring your WWW client is the next step. If you are using Mac Mosaic, you need to define a file name extension mapping that maps the ".xcl" suffix into a specific MIME type and "Helper Application." Once you've done this, selecting a URL like http://your.machttp.host/BigBucks.xcl will cause MacHTTP to send the Excel file as a binary file. Mac Mosaic will map the ".xcl" extension into whatever MIME type you've defined, and then map the document type into a specific application (i.e. Excel) that will be run to view the document. Note that ".xcl" was chosen randomly for this example. You may define whatever suffix seems most appropriate as long as it doesn't conflict with existing extensions defined by Mosaic.