When Internet Explorer receives an HTTP response and the Content-Type header is set to Text/Plain, the browser still performs data sampling to determine the content type.

For example, if you create the following file, and then put the file in a virtual directory (or in an Active Server Pages (ASP) page that sets the Content-Type header to Text/Plain), you see the raw XML content in the browser window when you load the file in Internet Explorer. Therefore, the XML parser is invoked because the Content-Type header changes to Text/XML.

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Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

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NOTE: Every XML document should start with the following tag:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
				

You may expect to resolve this issue when you set the IsTextPlainHonored registry key. For additional information about how to do this, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: However, if data sampling detects XML content, Internet Explorer ignores this revised registry value.

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