This is a standard Rails code. I am using Rails 2.3.5 .

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @users = User.all
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.js  { render :json => @users }      
    end
  end
end

Accidentally in one of my controllers the order of formats got reversed. The altered code looks like this.

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @users = User.all
    respond_to do |format|
      format.js  { render :json => @users }      
      format.html      
    end
  end
end

I thought order of format declaration does not matter. I was wrong.

> curl -I http://localhost:3000/users
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:32:16 GMT
ETag: "d751713988987e9331980363e24189ce"
Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8
X-Runtime: 62
Content-Length: 2
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, must-revalidate

Notice the the Content-Type of in the response header is text/javascript in stead of text/html .

Well I guess the order of format matters. I hope it is fixed in Rails 3.