Mac browser problem ("404: page not found"): summary

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Earlier today, I wrote to report an erratic problem I've been having 
with Safari and Internet Explorer running under OS-X. In this problem, 
pages sometimes refuse to display ("page not found"), even though they 
display just fine in my client's Windows browser.

I received many suggestions, including (most embarrassingly for the one 
URL I'd archived to serve as an example) the simple problem that the 
.html at the end of the URL had been incorrectly copied as .htm by my 
client. Should have thought of that one! <blush> That particular glitch 
may have been the problem with other URLs too, none of which I kept 
copies of for further testing. Should the problem arise again, I'll 
also try out the following suggestions to see if they solve the 
problem:

- If you're confident the URL is basically correct, try changing the 
.html extension to an .htm extension, or vice versa, just in case the 
terminal letter got truncated or added by mistake.

- Some Web pages contain content that is only readable with ActiveX, 
Java, or both enabled. The page may simply not be found because the 
code required to find and open it won't run, and you won't get any 
indication that this is the source of the problem. I've disabled both 
because ActiveX is a notorious security hole and Java's security has 
been questioned by people I respect (including one who works for Sun 
and who shall remain nameless). As the pages I was visiting were 
"trusted", I enabled both ActiveX and Java, quit and restarted the 
brower, and tried again. This solved the problem. (Thanks, Kat!)

- Windows filenames are case-insensitive, unlike UNIX, so it's worth 
checking any URL that ends in .html (most common on Unix systems) to 
confirm that the capitalization is correct. URLs ending in .htm are 
most often (not always) generated from Windows systems, where case is 
unimportant. There may be Mac vs PC differences in the way that a 
browser such as Internet Explorer handles this difference.

- When creating your own Web pages, be aware that capitalization 
differences such as these may bedevil you or your users. To be safe, 
pick a simple standard such as "all names entirely in lowercase" that 
works for everyone.

-  Internet Explorer in general, and running under Windows in 
particular, is notorious for its lackadaisical support of WWW 
standards. Filenames that work fine under Windows versions of IE may 
thus break under other operating systems or in other browsers.

Thanks to David Brown, Peter Harkins, Gene Kim-Eng, and Kat Nagel for 
helpful advice. If you wrote to me and aren't included in this list, 
please try again; your mail never arrived, for which I apologize.

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)


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