[l2h] Re: Weirdness for MSIE5 under NT4 SP4

Sat, 13 Nov 1999 10:59:11 +1100 (EST)

Fred Drake wrote:
> 
>   Note: I'm still using an older version ($Id: latex2html,v 1.79
> 1998/08/16 08:04:15 RRM Exp $), so this may no longer apply.
>   I've received a note from a user that when using MSIE 5 to read a
> LaTeX2HTML-generated page, using "refresh" (F5) causes the page not to 
> be reloaded properly; the result is a blank page.  He's tracked it
> down to the comment placed between the doctype declaration and the
> <HTML> tag; moving it to after the <HTML> tag makes it work.  If the
> comment is still being placed there, perhaps it should be move to
> after the HTML-element start tag.

Can anyone verify Fred's discovery and analysis ?
Surely it affects many many other documents, not just ones
created by LaTeX2HTML.

Fred, can you please give URLs to pages that you know to be affected?
The comment is the one that starts:

<!--Converted with LaTeX2HTML ....

Yes, the comment is still generated in that position.
though now it is preceeded by a blank line.

I believe it to be perfectly valid according to SGML rules,
as well as HTML --- don't know about XML.
Confirmation please.

Moving the comment does not solve the problem for the tens of thousands
of files already created with LaTeX2HTML, whereas a bug-fix from Microsoft
would be a complete solution; so I'm inclined to just ignore this one.

Besides, moving that information comment to after <HTML>
can mean putting it a long way down the file, when
there are lots of <META> tags in the header portion.
It just doesn't seem appropriate to do this, sorry.

On the other hand, if there is an error in the syntax of the comment
itself, then that should indeed be fixed. But then why is it just being
discovered now? 

But wait-on.
I've seen similar behaviour before, which I rationalised as follows.
THe 'Refresh' button could be reloading the last file down-loaded.
This is often *not* the HTML page that the browser is displaying,
but the CSS stylesheet used in determining how to display the information
content of the HTML file.

It used to be a real problem with Netscape, when an HTML file asked
for a CSS stylesheet, but that file could not be found.
Netscape threw up an error and would not display the HTML document.
Trying to back-out using the `Back` button would not work,
since this would get the HTML file, which would ask for the same
missing CSS style-sheet.

Maybe there is a similar problem with MS's Refresh that is asking
to display the CSS as if it were HTML. This would probably result
in a blank page. Why the position of the comment makes any difference;
well that's anyone's guess.

Hope this helps,

	Ross Moore

> 
>   -Fred
> 
> --
> Fred L. Drake, Jr.	     <fdrake@acm.org>
> Corporation for National Research Initiatives