Google Answers Logo
View Question
 
Q: HTML code different when requested from same Server on different computers ( Answered 5 out of 5 stars,   5 Comments )
Question  
Subject: HTML code different when requested from same Server on different computers
Category: Computers > Internet
Asked by: mesamike-ga
List Price: $40.00
Posted: 13 Apr 2005 14:55 PDT
Expires: 13 May 2005 14:55 PDT
Question ID: 508940
I have a website www.jimboringrealestate.com in which the banner at
the top of the page (images/banner.jpg) fails to display in a few
customers? Internet Explorer v6 web browsers.  By failing to display I
mean that there isn?t even a placeholder for where the banner would be
or no little red ?x? in the box as if it couldn?t read the picture.
The source code downloaded from the server just doesn?t contain the
IMG syntax to view the banner.

I had two similar laptops hooked to the same dsl line, running the
same version of IE 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158 with Update
Version SP2, and one displays the banner and the other one doesn?t.
They are both XP machines. There are other customers out in the
?world? that have also reported not being able to view the banner.
Some of these are desktop models as well.

In looking at the html source code on each laptop for the index.htm
page, here is a snippet of the one that works:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>

<title content="">Jim Boring Real Estate Investments - Idaho Farm,
Ranch, Home and Business Property For Sale</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="removed for bevity">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="description" content="Removed for brevity">

</head>

<BODY bgColor=#ffffff link="#990000" vlink="#4B0612" alink="#993333"
topMargin=10 marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=744 align=center border=0>
  <TBODY>
  <TR>
    <TD colspan="2"><img src="images/banner.jpg" alt="Jim Boring Real
Estate Investments" width="751" height="171"></TD>
  </TR>
  <TR>
etc.

------
The only difference in the non-working source was that it took the line 

<TD colspan="2"><img src="images/banner.jpg" alt="Jim Boring Real
Estate Investments" width="751" height="171"></TD>

and made it  

<TD colspan="2"></TD>

The whole <img> construct just isn?t in the code.

I do not use any server side inserts ? nothing fancy, just plain old
Dreamweaver generated vanilla code. I am looking for a solution to
this problem.
Answer  
Subject: Re: HTML code different when requested from same Server on different computers
Answered By: webadept-ga on 14 Apr 2005 08:49 PDT
Rated:5 out of 5 stars
 
Hi, 

Replace from the body tag down to the first row of your table
---- THIS -----

<BODY bgColor=#ffffff link="#990000" vlink="#4B0612" alink="#993333"
topMargin=10 marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=744 align=center border=0>
  <TBODY>
  <TR>

    <TD colspan="2"><img src="images/banner.jpg" alt="Jim Boring Real
Estate Investments" width="751" height="171"></TD>
  </TR>



-------------------

with this

--------- THAT ----------

<BODY bgColor=#ffffff link="#990000" vlink="#4B0612" alink="#993333"
topMargin=10 marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=752 align=center border=0>
  <TBODY>
  <TR>
    <TD><img src="http://www.jimboringrealestate.com/images/banner.jpg"
alt="Jim Boring Real Estate Investments" width="751"
height="171"></TD>
  </TR>
</table>
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=744 align=center border=0>
  <TBODY>

---------------------------
Replace your banner.jpg file with this one (save a copy of your
original first of course)
http://www.webadept.net/banner_lite.jpg

Rename it to banner.jpg and put it on your server. This is probably
not the problem but your original is 42k in size. The one I have there
is about half that size and will load much faster.

And let me know how that turns out. If all is right with your world
I'll write you up an explanation of all the minor changes I made for
your future reference.

webadept-ga

Request for Answer Clarification by mesamike-ga on 14 Apr 2005 16:05 PDT
Hi Webadept-ga,

I took your advice and also refined it with some of the other comments
and it still didn't work. I even just create a very simple webpage
taking into account your comments below at
http://jimboringrealestate.com/tester1.htm and on the laptop that
doesn't read the banner, it just shows the two text lines right next
to each other. The code for my simple webpage is:
---------------------------
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<BODY bgColor="#ffffff" link="#990000" vlink="#4B0612" alink="#993333"
topMargin=10 marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">
Before Banner
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=744 align=center border=0>
  <TBODY>
  <TR>
    <TD><img src="http://www.jimboringrealestate.com/images/banner.jpg"
alt="Jim Boring Real Estate Investments" width="740" height="168"></TD>
  </TR>

</table>
After Banner
</body>
</html>
-----------------------------
You can go to the web and enter that site address in. Are you seeing
the banner? Is anyone out there NOT seeing the banner?
I even reduced the physical dimensions of the banner.jpg to 740x168.
I can't seem to think outside the box on this one. I'm still in need of a solution.

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 14 Apr 2005 16:39 PDT
Hi, 

I've had eight people so far take a look, and thus far everyone is
seeing the banner. I think what we are dealing with here, might be a
laptop issue, rather than a webpage issue.

If you would be kind enough to do me a favore here, please go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

download the antispyware you find there. It is safe and despite my
general attitude, a very good antispyware program. It is espesially
good at fixing up IE. Install that, and let it run a full scan. After
you are done with that, reboot the laptop and take a look at it again.

thanks, 

webadept-ga

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 14 Apr 2005 16:52 PDT
Also Jim, why do you have  DIV tags in there? 

Did you try the code as I suggested above, or are you mixing in a lot
of commentors opinions from below?

With that lap top which doesn't like the banner.jpg go to
http://www.webadept.net/test.html
and see what you can see there. 

webadept-ga

Request for Answer Clarification by mesamike-ga on 14 Apr 2005 21:45 PDT
Back again,
I have forwarded the links to your webpage to the people who are
having banner problems to see if the banner is now viewable. Even
though for simplicity, I have used the comparison of laptops in the
office, this is not isolated to them. Other desktop computers (at
least one from back east) are experiencing the same problem so it is
not isolated to laptops or geographical region.

I tried to isolate the problem to Internet explorer by having the
laptop with the banner problem download Firefox. AFter installing that
and running Firefox, The problem still existed on it. So it isn't just
an IE problem.

I still keep coming back to the wierd phenomena - The HTML source with
the missing banner is just missing that whole <img...> syntax. What
could cause that to be removed. The Server? Why would it descriminate?
The browser? It isn't just IE. I'm sure I'm going to kick myself when
the solution is found but it is sure not obvious right now and I'm
taking great comfort that powerhouse brains such as yours are having
some challenges also.

I will have one of the machines download the MS anti-spyware software,
run it and reboot and see what happens there.

As far as the DIV tags, they are generated by Dreamweaver, not me. I
don't mess with the code unless absolutely necessary.

So, I'll get back here tomorrow when I find out more. Just for
clarification, I am about 75 miles from where the machines are
located. I am having my client do all these machinations remotely.

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 14 Apr 2005 22:40 PDT
So they are having the same problem on my website as they are having
on your website... same thing, they can't see the image. Right?

webadept-ga

Request for Answer Clarification by mesamike-ga on 15 Apr 2005 14:25 PDT
I have finally come to a resolution - but it defies logic. Yes, the
customers where able to go to your site and see the banner. Great. I
just took your code and integrated it into mine. Didn't work. Spent
hours diddling around with and without customer on the phone.

With all your input and my futzing around I discovered a solution. If
I change the name of the jpg from "banner.jpg" to something else, such
as "banner5.jpg" it works, even in the original code. I dupped the
banner5.jpg to the name banner.jpg, and then by just changing the
banner name by one character in the code, it worked but remove the
character and it doesn't. Very odd but I have spent way too much time
on this to do any more fooling around for now.

So for the time being, I have changed the pages to point to
banner5.jpg and it works fine for all computers. Ever so queer!

I appreciate your help in giving me some alternatives and you have way
earned your $40. Thanks for sticking it out with me.

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 15 Apr 2005 17:19 PDT
I thought of that, which is why I changed the name on the page I made
on my site. Glad to help with this. Some of the other things I did if
you look at the code I gave you is link to the image using full URL
address, and changed the table size to be larger than the image.

No doubt the client is using some type of advertisment blocker on
their computer, which isn't allowing images named "banner".. best to
call those headers or topimage, or something of that nature anyway.
LogoBar is always good.

Anyway, good luck and hope things go better for you than stuff like this. 

webadept-ga

Request for Answer Clarification by mesamike-ga on 15 Apr 2005 18:37 PDT
PostScript: I did go onto Google and typed in "missing banner.jpg"
(which I should have done first) and lo and behold, all kinds of stuff
popped up. Seems like Norton Systemworks 2003 when it has banner ad
suppression turned on, looks for items of a certain size that have all
kinds of names including forms of "banner" and suppress them. All
kinds of developers are affected.

Check out http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum20/2020.htm.

A wiser man I am I am.
mesamike-ga rated this answer:5 out of 5 stars
Only God knows the real solution to this problem, but I appreciate the
help to give me some insight to the "solution." That is what I was
looking for.

Comments  
Subject: Re: HTML code different when requested from same Server on different computers
From: ucanotdothat-ga on 13 Apr 2005 17:14 PDT
 
HTML problems?
Would like to see your site to get the total page. Suspect your html is faulty.
A flaw anywhere will create this sort of problem. Computers try to put
together inaccurate html pages by filling in the spaces, different
results from different computers. Recomend downloading "html tidy".
Here is a great source to check your page and see for yourself:
http://validator.w3.org/
 Check your site on this page, and find the html tidy "MAX's HTML
Beauty++ 2004"to edit pages in the future. Using complete addresses on
your images may be beneficial. Hope this helps. I keep my pages
compliant to w3c standards at http://gifbrothers.com with a lot of
images, also simple html.
Subject: Re: HTML code different when requested from same Server on different computers
From: mesamike-ga on 13 Apr 2005 20:46 PDT
 
You can go to the site using the reference in the question -
www.jimboringrealestate.com and then use the menu option View/Source.
I use DW and Trellian and do not alter the HTML directly, just use the
WYSIWYG interface. This doesn't make sense that the same browser
version on different computers will remove that section of code.
Subject: Re: HTML code different when requested from same Server on different computers
From: frde-ga on 14 Apr 2005 01:59 PDT
 
I think I know what your problem is.

One, or both, of your machines are reading the HTML from the cache
- not from the webserver

Hit the Refresh button to force a refresh.

It is very unlikely that a browser would (ahem) edit the HTML.
- unless you have some sort of image stripper/anti popup installed
Subject: Re: HTML code different when requested from same Server on different computers
From: mesamike-ga on 14 Apr 2005 09:08 PDT
 
I did do a refresh on that machine. That would not explain the problem
with various people who had never visited the site before having the
same problem of the banner not showing up.
The owner of the laptop did turn off his Norton anti-popup software
but that did not affect the situation. The other pictures on the page
work just fine. It is just the banner.
Still hoping someone out there might know.....
Subject: Re: HTML code different when requested from same Server on different computers
From: lrulrick-ga on 14 Apr 2005 12:40 PDT
 
Hold on- try changing just the <TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0
width=744 align=center border=0>
At this time your table width is smaller than your image. I would have
to say that of all issues this is mostly to cause your problem. Some
computer will ignore the sizing issues while others will be completely
offended and refuse to accept your coding for it. Try making your
table bigger or your image smaller!

Important Disclaimer: Answers and comments provided on Google Answers are general information, and are not intended to substitute for informed professional medical, psychiatric, psychological, tax, legal, investment, accounting, or other professional advice. Google does not endorse, and expressly disclaims liability for any product, manufacturer, distributor, service or service provider mentioned or any opinion expressed in answers or comments. Please read carefully the Google Answers Terms of Service.

If you feel that you have found inappropriate content, please let us know by emailing us at answers-support@google.com with the question ID listed above. Thank you.
Search Google Answers for
Google Answers  


Google Home - Answers FAQ - Terms of Service - Privacy Policy