Member Avatar for andrewthk

Hey,

When I log in to the site:

http://www.tbmail.net

using user ID:
Password: andrew

(Divulging ID and Password for this account doesn't matter)

The tables are displayed nicely in IE, but in Firefox, it doesn't display the table and it seem to stop at the loading page.

I tried the Mozilla validation program, and it came up with around 1000 warnings but no errors. All the warnings seems harmless.

Can anyone help me out?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by tgreer

Dani AI

Generated

As noted, telling the browser which HTML flavor the document uses is the first step. is also right that Internet Explorer is much more forgiving; IE can silently “fix” broken markup that causes Firefox to stop rendering. The behaviour described (tables visible in IE but the page halts in Firefox) is most often caused by a fatal parse problem rather than a simple styling bug — common examples are an unclosed HTML comment, an unclosed <script> block, malformed conditional comments, or stray bytes (a UTF‑8 BOM) inserted before the DOCTYPE.

A practical checklist to isolate and fix the problem (in order):

  • Add a standards-mode DOCTYPE (modern pages should use HTML5) and ensure it is the very first bytes of the response — no spaces, BOM or server output before it.
  • Use Firefox’s Error Console / Web Console to spot JavaScript/parsing errors that stop rendering. Disable JavaScript to see if markup alone renders.
  • Compare “View Source” (raw HTML) with the DOM inspector. If the DOM ends earlier than the source, that points to a parser-aborting construct (unclosed comment/script/etc.).
  • Temporarily remove external CSS and JavaScript to eliminate styling and script interference.
  • Search the source for stray “<!--” without a matching “-->”, unclosed <script> tags, and IE-only conditional comment blocks that aren’t properly closed.
  • Run HTML Tidy or an HTML validator and focus on structural errors (unclosed tags, unterminated comments) rather than cosmetic warnings.
  • If server-side templates are used, generate a static snapshot to rule out runtime template issues.

A minimal, robust header forces standards mode and a known charset:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <title>Page title</title>
</head>

Make changes incrementally and test after each step. Keep a backup of the original source, and remove any live credentials from public pages or posts (the sample account details in the thread should be removed).

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for tgreer

The page has no DOCTYPE. That's where you have to start. Once you have a valid DOCTYPE, then you can begin to narrow down the problems.

Member Avatar for andrewthk

I don't know much about doctypes, and googling it didn't help because i wasn't sure what it's talking about.
Which doctype should i use?
I tried it all but only
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
seems to display the page.

Does this mean that the page was written in HTML 3.2?
How can you tell which HTML was used to write the page?

Member Avatar for php4ever

The <doctype> has nothing to do with you the visitor it has everything to do with the developer of that site.

Without it, IE is can go into quirks mode and FF just faints.

Jared

Member Avatar for andrewthk

I am the developer. I have to make some modifications to the page that was developed by someone else. The problem is that the page isn't displaying properly in firefox.

Member Avatar for tgreer

HTML comes in many flavors, including the XHTML subsets. Each "type" of HTML includes various allowable elements and properties. A browser needs to know which type of HTML your document uses, thus, the "DOCTYPE". If no DOCTYPE is provided, the browser will fall into what is know as "quirks" mode, meaning, they will do whatever the designers of the browser set as the default for any given element. This causes the differences one sees between IE and FF. To prevent this, you must specify a proper, complete doctype. We can't tell you which you should use, because we don't know which HTML specification was used to code the page.

Referece: http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/html/doctype.html

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