Question

It appears this code will request the file in Chrome and IE but not in Firefox.

<script type="text/my-custom-mime-type" src="test.ashx">
</script>

Is there a some spec that says browsers should only process JavaScript related mime-types?
I know IE probably supports this because of the history with vbscript.

Once you have “content” like this downloaded how can you get access to it?
Does JavaScript/jQuery/? have some way of getting at this.

UPDATE
So there is 2 parts to question. Sounds like for the first part – the browser will download what it will download and I guess there isn’t much you can do about that based off the answers so far.

Example:
<script type="text/xml-script">
<page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xml-script/2005">
<components>
<application load="page_load" />
</components>
</page>
</script>
</pre>

this is a snippet from Microsoft’s declarative MSAjax tech. Could you pull this in from an external file. Note: I’m not trying to use MSAjax here, but its a good example of a custom type being used for a script tag.

Part 2 – can you get access to the text if the “content” does download? For example, lets say its JavaScript – could you display it in a textbox? (without an explicit Ajax call)?

Answer 1

Is there a some spec that says browsers should only process JavaScript related mime-types?

See the type attribute:

This attribute gives an advisory hint as to the content type of the content available at the link target address. It allows user agents to opt to use a fallback mechanism rather than fetch the content if they are advised that they will get content in a content type they do not support.

If you want to fetch arbitrary content for use in a script, use XMLHttpRequest.