h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Help - I don't normally actually paste work links around here but this one is puzzling me a lot

http://www.swenvo.org.uk/environment/sec2_fishing.htm

(sort of what I was talking about here F73672?thread=221828&latest=1)

In some IE browsers (mainly 6) and on different OSs the page doesn't render, the user just sees the raw XHTML.

I can't recreate this on my PC with IE6, Mozilla, Netscape 4.7, Opera 6.0, they all work fine.

There are a few problems with the XHTML according to the W3 validator, but none that I haven't got on working pages.

Any one?

Many thanks

Chris

Well - in my IE6 I can't make it make a problem either...
Not very helpful, is it...?

may have sorted that one with help from another researcher, try http://www.swenvo.org.uk/environment/sec5_contam_land.htm

Cheers for trying

Chris

I have two suggestions:

First, you should probably remove the XML declaration from your pages - an XML declaration will throw IE into quirks mode. Not so good if you're rendering proper pages. This is a problem with the browser.

Second, make sure your pages are valid XML. I've had problems with IE before where it suddenly decided it was going to treat the XHTML as XML like it's supposed to and if there's an error in the page it refuses to render and instead produces an error message and a parse tree. It's rare but I've seen it.

Let me know if that helps.

Cheers

stripping the XML declaration (put in by Dreamweaver, not me) seem to have worked - oddly the page it worked on first was totally valid XHTML - the others have a few minir problems in.

Stripping out of all the rest now - what exactly is the intention of this line? I left it in because DW put it in.

Still no idea why some pages with it work, and some don't and why they all work on my test browsers though.

Ta

CH

Oh and when the pages (all now working) were showing code it was coloured up (like the Mozilla show code) and the line that says in my source, read DOCTYPE html (View Source for full doctype...)> Weird? CH

It looks like it was the encoding I had set (no idea from where, maybe old FrontPage thing) - the bad pages were set at Windows 1252 - I guess the client PCs for some reason, despite running Windows, had problems with this character set, or maybe a specific character on the page.

Still hate copmputers

CH

The XML declaration tells whatever program is reading the line that a) the document is an XML document and b) the version of XML that the document uses.

Whether the pages work or not is somewhat dependant on the version and patch levels of the browsers that are being used. Different versions behave different ways.

What did you change the character encoding to? I would recommend using utf-8, myself.

In the end I used iso-8859-1 - debated the utf-8 is there any benefits

Cheers

CH

iso-8859-1 can only display Western European characters; utf-8 can display practically anything. If you aren't going to be including arbitrary oriental characters, etc. then iso-8859-1 is fine.