Firefox 1.5 (Mac) no HTML preview

[ktinkel]

How odd.

I was working on a web page, previewing regularly in Safari, but then decided to check several browsers. The page also showed properly in Mozilla, Opera, OmniWeb, even in MSIE 5.2.3. But not in Firefox, which gave me a Mac -10660 error.

This page has a very long path name, so on a hunch, I dragged its folder out onto the desktop, and from there the page previewed fine in Firefox. (It was only three levels down.)

I’m not sure whether it was the length of the path or the fact that some of the folders had spaces in their names. But I have never had this problem before this version of FF, so thought I would mention it.

[donmcc]

Has the page been validated? Although it sounds like a long URI is the problem, I find that validating at W3.org tends to clear up a lot of other potential cross browser problems.

Don McCahill

[iamback]

I’m not sure whether it was the length of the path or the fact that some of the folders had spaces in their names. But I have never had this problem before this version of FF, so thought I would mention it.
I would bet it's the space in a folder name, causing a space in the URL: they are not allowed and if Firefox does not support that it woudl be entirely correct. I'm surprised to hear Mozilla "corrected" the URL (presumably the same way IE is doing: by internally changing the space(s) to %20, effectively URL-encoding the incorrect URL).

Try this: in Firefox's address bar, paste (or type) the complete path - and then replace each space in the path with %20 - does it work then?

[ktinkel]

I would bet it's the space in a folder name, causing a space in the URL: they are not allowed and if Firefox does not support that it woudl be entirely correct.These are local folders on my desktop, and they have been there since forever — and past versions of Firefox coped with them. (I don’t have any spaces in file or folder names on the server, of course).

Try this: in Firefox's address bar, paste (or type) the complete path - and then replace each space in the path with %20 - does it work then?Firefox did replace spaces in the path name with %20 (rightly or wrongly). I think what messed it up was the nonbreaking space I had prefaced the name of my “current” folder (to bring it up to the top of the list in my work space) — that it did not know to convert, and thus refused the file.

I had the identical result when I tried to validate by upload at W3C; hated the one with the nonbreaking space, was very happy with the other.

This all started when I reformatted a drive recently, and abandoned the partitions. Bad move — now a file like this is nearly 20 steps down, and there are plenty of opportunities to offend the path name guardians!

[iamback]

Firefox did replace spaces in the path name with %20 (rightly or wrongly). I think what messed it up was the nonbreaking space I had prefaced the name of my “current” folder (to bring it up to the top of the list in my work space) — that it did not know to convert, and thus refused the file.Ahh, very interesting!

This all started when I reformatted a drive recently, and abandoned the partitions. Bad move — now a file like this is nearly 20 steps down, and there are plenty of opportunities to offend the path name guardians! Partitions are GOOD! Why abandon them?

(Says Marjolein who spent ALL of last weekend reorganizing two hard drives, shifting, growing and shrinking 18 partitions... but couldn't live without them!)

[ktinkel]

Partitions are GOOD! Why abandon them?Because Mac hotshots kept saying there was no longer any need for them (it used to be necessary to avoid having more than the allowable number of objects in a folder — and, of course, extra-long path names)! I needed to fix something and it was easier to reformat the drive, and I decided at that time to do without the partitions. But I regret it now.

Fortunately, I only redid one drive, the smaller (80 GB), and right now it has only about 8 gigs of stuff on it. I had four volumes, which was annoying. But two or three would be good.

The 120 has four volumes, and that seems fine.

I like sorting stuff out and having more than one bootable volume, just in case.

[LoisWakeman]

I remember someone posting in INETPUB that their ancient ourworld pages wouldn't retrieve any more - the reason turned out to be because they'd used accented characters in the page names - legal when Mosaic was the browser of choice, of course! Ah: the days of black TNR on grey...

[ktinkel]

I remember someone posting in INETPUB that their ancient ourworld pages wouldn't retrieve any more - the reason turned out to be because they'd used accented characters in the page names …I remember that thread, and remember thinking that was a wacky thing to do, even way back when.

But now I am being caught even on my own hard drive. Hrmmmmph. <g>