> I'm interested in some sort of tag or code which alerts the browser that a
> particular file is for downloading to the local machine only, such as .zip
...
> Is this a feature which exists? If not, is it a reasonable concept?
No, this information shouldn't be in the link.
> I'm aware that if configured correctly, some browsers can do the above when
> a certain type of document is called, but this is a manual switch not all
> users will be aware of.
Then make it obvious in the browser. For example, you could put a little
disk icon beside each link (I wouldn't personally care for that
but I'm just showing you some of the options).
With recent versions of NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System users can
specify they want certain types of data to be saved to a file and
not viewed in their .mailcap files. For example:
video/quicktime; mosiac-internal-dump %s
I *do* think that browsers should be able to save to a file after they
download the data and "view" it.
--sanders