Add mime type to HTML link

Question

I know how to change the MIME type in a webserver. I used this to make sure the browser downloads my .scrpt file instead of opening the plain text version. So far so good but is it possible to do the same with a link? I would like to link to a file on GitHub but this will open as a plain text file. Can I add a "MIME type attribute" to the link to tell the browser to download the file?

This is what I would like to see:

<a mimetype="application/octet-stream" href="http://gist.github.com/raw/279094/39d5a2c1037288d5ee0ba1a17dca9edb368bbe42/RepairiPhotoDates.scpt">download</a>

Answer 1

Time to answer my own question. This is a really old question and it probably wasn't possible at the time but lots has changed since then. The HTML5 spec added the download attribute:

<a href="hugepdf.pdf" download>Download file</a>

This will do exactly what I need, tell the browser to download the file instead of opening it. Thanks to Jonathan Svärdén for solving my years old question!