This page renders in IE. It does not in Firefox. Why?
Let’s find out.
It’s because the webserver returns a “Content-Type: text/plain” header instead of a “Content-Type: text/html” one.
IE, like a helpful puppy, looks at the contents and renders the html.
Firefox does what the server tells it to and renders it as plain text.
Which is doing the right thing? There’s a religious debate for you. I think Firefox is doing the right thing.
But is it really the web server’s fault? Note that the page has no file extension. How is poor Apache to know what the content type should be without a little help from the page creator? How much more work would it have been to type .html? Or .htm? Or even .h if you are lazy and configure Apache to serve .h as html pages?
Let’s look a little further:
Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7d PowWeb/1.1
Ah, a FrontPage user. There you go.
Standards? What are those for?
Yet another stupid decision made by a web programmer.
Update: I poked around some more and clicked on the “Home” button which takes you to the front page. Or it would if they had an index.html page defined. But they don’t, so you get a directory listing.
I see several index pages:
index1.html
index111a.html
index2.html
indexWORKS.html
indexdeact.html
indexold
indexold.html
but no index.html
Whoops!
