With Leopard 10.5.1, Apple’s developers changed the default status of html files downloaded from the internet from ‘safe’ to ‘Unsafe’.

While this may make sense from a security standpoint, for somebody like me that processes hundreds of html files downloaded every day, it’s a big annoyance.

I filed a bug with Apple, asking for a workaround. I was hoping that they would implement a preference somehow to enable me to either override the default settings or allow me to specify trusted servers.

Tonight, three months later, I received an answer and the workaround that I was looking for.

I turned out that you could have a user specific file to override the system’s default settings. The file is not there normally, so you would need to create it. It is:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist

The contents of the file need to be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>LSRiskCategorySafe</key>
	<dict>
		<key>LSRiskCategoryContentTypes</key>
		<array>
			<string>public.html</string>
			<string>public.xml</string>
			<string>public.php-script</string>
			<string>com.microsoft.windows-media-wmv</string>
		</array>
		<key>LSRiskCategoryExtensions</key>
		<array>
			<string>xhtml</string>
		</array>
	</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Download Sample File

Hopefully that helps somebody else with this type of problem.

If you need to change the settings of other file types, here are the system-declared file types:

System-Declared Uniform Type Identifiers

For each type you add another <string></string> item to the above array.

For example, for jpeg2000 files you add:

	<string>public.jpeg-2000</string>

Right below the other <string> line in the first array.

To declare files by extension, you add:

	<string>odf</string>

Right below the other <string> line in the second array.