[thelist] What is wrong with this site?

[Simon Willison]

Peter Kaulback wrote:

> An associate sent me this site url 
> http://www.niagarapeninsula.com/index2.shtml as an example site yet it 
> does not work in Netscape or Mozilla. What is wrong with the code?

The web server it is running on is configured incorrectly; the document 
is being served up with a Content-Type header of text/plain, when the 
Content-Type should be text/html. This is probably because the .shtml 
file extension is not mapped to the right Content-Type - I'm willing to 
bet that if the file were renamed to index2.html the server would start 
serving it up correctly and it would work in Mozilla.

This is a classic example of IE being horribly, horribly broken. Instead 
of serving the document up as plain text (as the Content-Type tells it 
to) IE "guesses" that it's really HTML based on analysis of the 
document. It shouldn't be doing this, and the fact that it does means 
pages are harder to debug (and in many cases aren't debugged at all as 
the page author only tests them in IE).

Cheers,

Simon Willison