What problems may using the MIME type application/json cause?

Question

I am working on a web service the needs to return JSON data. I read that I should use application/json but am not sure what problems this may cause?

For example, w

Answer 1

Having just had a long fight with IE8 myself with this I found that if you're loading the json into an iframe as text/plain, IE8 will wrap this in a tag. If you then fetch the content out with innerHTML and try to parse this as json, it'll fail.

I ended up having to send the content as text/html, which just seems totally wrong, but works in IE and doesn't seem to mess up other browsers more modern AJAX handling.