The MIME-type should be text/plain. However, you should also give your file the .txt file extension, because IE ignores MIME-types, using instead the OS' file associations.

Can you give me a sample of how to set it? Basically the page is simply displaying the words (and then the text):

Content-Type: text/plain

but the browser is not acting on it and serving it up for me to download..

What server-side language are you using to create the file? Here's a PHP example:


You can provide a meta-tag, however, it may not work in all browsers. The proper way is to set the MIME-type in the HTTP headers (which is what PHP is doing, above), rather than in the HTML document itself. The meta-tag:


That would go in the "head" section of your HTML.

perl (but only because that's what the pages written by somebody else are written in...)

Put this before any page content.