Hey Tony,

I've seen this happen and although I don't have any concrete answers, we can speculate a bit.

I think most of the time it's simply bad coding...The person responsible for creating the web page and writing the proper anchor tags doesn't always check to see if the links are correct and working. And, I'm not exactly sure if some web servers out there will substitute a small .html file for a link that doesn't work.

Here's another example....I've been searching for a copy of Alabama's Angels Among Us on Vanbasco's for the past few weeks. If you were to go this page and give this query a try, you would end up with many hits, the first four being relevant. But you could not right-click on any one of those four links and do a SaveAs without getting a .html file. You would have to click on the link to the actual web page and from there find the appropriate midi file that you could then right-click and save. And yet there are times when the link to the actual midi file does show up on the Vanbasco Search page and therefore right-clickin' would work.

Lots and lots of stuff to learn about metadata and how search engines track down, sort, and use it.

I've never had any luck renaming a .html file to a .mid and getting it to work. Bottom line (IMHO), you never got the intended .mid file in the first place.

Hope this helps.

mike

[This message has been edited by msutliff (edited 07-22-2003).]