displaying encripted pages
I'm using two form pages on a web site. Both forms are scripted server side and I have linked them through my hosting companies secure server - the remaining four pages on the site are unencrypted. On cross browser testing, the results are as follows: Chrome - display works perfectly. As you switch between the encrypted and unencrypted pages you can see the URL change from the secure to non-secure pages. You get the green padlock in the address bar on the secure pages and if you right click it, it gives you all the info you need as regards the Equifax cert. Opera: Like watching paint dry, but again the display is OK - eventually. Neurotic Explorer 8 - although I have linked the forms themselves through the secure server, you still get the irritating security warnings about displaying mixed content - I know you can turn this off but most people can't be bothered or don't know how to. However, the display is again OK. Now to the point: Firefox 3.6.13 - display works perfectly - you get the blue box in the address bar where you can access the cert. info. However, there is one small (irritating) glitch. The encrypted pages are not displayed correctly in as much as there is a small portion of visible (encrypted?) code right at the top of the page. You can see this phenomena at www.geta-website.co.uk/supervision/. The two pages in question are 'vacancies' and 'contact'. If there are any Guru’s out there who could throw some light on this – or even better, come up with a simple solution, I would be eternally grateful. I’m using a third party commercial software package for the forms, which I find works great. I shall leave the site up for 24 hours so any interested parties can have a look for themselves.
All Replies (6)
You might want to post in the Web Development / Standards Evangelism forum at MozillaZine. The helpers over there are more knowledgeable about web page development issues with Firefox.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=25
You'll need to register and login to be able to post in that forum.
That is an UTF-8 byte order mark and that indicates that the pages were created as UTF-8 but send by the servers as Western ISO-8859-15. See Tools > Page Info > General
Firefox ignores a meta tag if the server sends a MIME type via the HTTP response headers.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Modified by cor-el
Hi cor-el - thanks for your input. I followed the Wikipedia link and read for as long as I could before my eyes started to glaze over. Perhaps I should re-phrase the question...'what can I do about it?'. If you have a solution, please remember I'm NOT a Guru! so words of one cylable would be OK with me !
The encrypted pages come via the https://web146.secure-secure.co.uk server and that server seems to send files by default as ISO-8859-1.
The geta-website.co.uk server doesn't send an encoding, so Firefox uses the content-type settings in the meta tag (http-equiv="Content-Type") and may also gets triggered by the BOM to switch to UTF-8
You will have to re-save those pages in the editor that you used to create them and make sure that you disable adding a BOM at the start of the file when saving. Then you need to upload the modified files to replace the current copies.
Hi cor-el. Just uploaded pages in ISO-8859-1. (Now that I can understand). Tested site on IE, Firefox, Chrome. Opera, Safari, Flock and Maxon 3. What can I say? - You are a true Guru! I am eternally grateful. May your God go with you and may you have good fortune for the rest of your days. And finally just.......thanks. I have learnt another valuable lesson.
You're welcome