Try to view http://www.ebay.com
The reason you can't is that Scamper sends

	Accept: application/octet-stream

as its accept header. If you change the code
to read 'text/html', it works. As does '*/*'.

Note that there's lots of places in the code where
'application/octet-stream' appear; this isn't really the
best place to use it. I think if you really don't care
about the type, you should use

	Accept: */*

application/octet-stream should be used for the default content-type
of the *received* data *if none is sent*, but I think (from reading
the RFC, anyway) that a server is justified in not viewing
application/octet-stream as being the same as */*. There may be
(or there may have been in the past) servers that viewed these the
same, or that needed to be sent application/octet-stream to get
binary out (ones that incorrectly assumed that a missing accept:
header meant 'text/html').

Now, it seems like the accepted types should be
answered by the client, rather than the URL
(which is where this is coming from). Scamper
might well be able to handle a number of different
kinds of things, and it should be able to ask for
them.

So I think in this case, it ought to send (at least)

	Accept: text/html, application/octet-stream

as well as whatever the flash type is, image types, etc.

Or we could just omit the Accept: header altogether, and
deal with unknown Mime types when they come in, but that doesn't
let the server give us what we prefer.

Or we could just send:

	Accept: */*

and deal with it.

We could also give preference levels:

	Accept: text/html, application/x-shockwave-flash; q=0.5

says we want HTML, but if that isn't available, give us Flash.

RFC 2068 (HTTP 1.1) says:

 If no Accept header field is present, then it is assumed that the
   client accepts all media types. If an Accept header field is present,
   and if the server cannot send a response which is acceptable
   according to the combined Accept field value, then the server SHOULD
   send a 406 (not acceptable) response.

And eBay's server did just that. It only sends text/html, thank you.

Scamper should (but I don't think it does) accept gzip or deflate
encodings, as well. This can speed up transmission considerably over slow
modems. But this would require changes to the program code, I think.
If we could, we'd send this:

	Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com