Re: Netscape vs Explorer problem

In the message "[MAGNet] Netscape vs Explorer problem", dated
2005-02-09, Pedro Alvarez, Jr. wrote:

>For the past few years, students have been able to request some of
>our services(slc.berkeley.edu) via the web. Lately, I've been
>hearing of students having problems with the links that go to those
>request pages. I checked the links from home and here at work. I
>use Explorer exclusively and all seemed to be fine. Someone
>mentioned using Netscape and when I tried the links via Netscape,
>indeed the links went to a stat21 page. This seemed to be true with
>a lot of the links on our site.
>Here's an example. Using Netscape, if one goes to slc.berkeley.edu
>then clicks on the Social Science link in the frame on the left, all
>the links on the ensuing social science page go to a stat21 page.
>However, as far as I know, when using the same example in Explorer
>all the links work fine.
>Has anyone experienced a similar problem and how might it be solved.
>My own personal opinion is to not use Netscape at all.

   There are few (if any) good reasons that a campus website shouldn't
work with a standards compliant browser, such as those in the
Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox family. Recommending that your site's
visitors not use one of those browsers isn't a good solution.
Rather, it's best to first look for errors on the site that may be
causing this problem.

At 14:36 -0800 2005-02-09, Rusty Wright wrote:
>See the httpd.apache.org docs on named-based virtual hosts:
>
> Some ancient clients are not compatible with name-based virtual
> hosting. For name-based virtual hosting to work, the client must
> send the HTTP Host header. ...

   Another, perhaps more likely culprit is invalid HTML on the pages
which exhibit discrepancies in the targets of hypertext links between
IE and Netscape. Various browsers have different parsers for
handling broken markup, and because of this, they may render those
pages differently. Try validating the suspect pages and see if this
yields any clues. For suggestions on validating HTML, see Webnet's
list of developer resources at:

   http://webnet.berkeley.edu/resources.php#val

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

P.S. Questions such as this can ideally also be posted to the Webnet list:

   http://webnet.berkeley.edu/list.php

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Received on Wed Feb 9 14:50:59 2005