Re: IE and Location header

Hi Tracy,

Thanks for the response see follow-up below ...

On Thu, 15 Oct 1998, Tracy Adams wrote:

> 404 is a file not found Error.

Yup, I know.  My hunch is that IE does some handshaking with server
on a redirect (for caching purposes perhaps) that Netscape does not.

> 
> If it works on Netscape, obviously the file is there.
> 
> I've had this happen when IE bashes up (destoyes) the URL.
> An example (might not exactly apply to this case)
> 
> IE 4 will bash anything that looks like escaped HTML --- if you
> your &section=value, &note=value , &quotation=value, etc.  you get
> some funny symbols in your URL.
> 
> I am not sure that you gave the URL exactly, but the @ sign
> might be giving you trouble.  Another problem might be spaces
> in your URL. URLs must be URLencoded.

The URL (as specified in message) works with IE up to the point of the 
semicolon - so @ sign is not the problem.  Incidentally, I've also tried
encoding the ampersands,semicolons,etc.

Nope, no spaces in the URL.  Looks to me that the parts of the URL that
must be encoded are.
 
> Things to try
> 1) Try the URL in IE browser directly, see what happens
> and if you can fix the URL
>

URL works fine with IE when entered directly from browser.  The problem
seems to be the redirect and how IE handles it.

> 2) Put the URL as a link in a plain HTML file.  View the source -
> Does it look funny? Click on it and view the location filed in your
> browser -- Does that look funny?
> 

Again the problem seems to be the redirect (Location header).  The URL
itself is valid.  Just apparently not to IE client IN a Location header.
What I'm trying to figure out is if there's something I can send IE in 
the header that will circumvent this problem.  Maybe you're right and
it's a matter of IE parsing the URL differently than Netscape (seems 
strange that IE would parse differently on a redirect as opposed to
standard user interface but who knows).  If so, does somebody 
know the escape sequence or encoding that IE wants - I've tried a few
dozen ways of encoding in order to get the last piece of the URL blessed
by IE but so far no luck.  

I've got a funny feeling that IE is just more stringent in it's
interpretation of guidelines for valid URL's sent in Location headers 
and what I'm trying to do is simply invalid.  Or maybe I need to be
sending a particular Content-type header in the script?

Anybody else got any ideas?  Is there a httpd guru out there who can 
tell me whether it's okay to send multiple name/value pairs and/or
status/values in a Location URL?

thanks for your help.

Received on Thursday, 15 October 1998 18:32:47 UTC