CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpinternet-explorerhttpinternet-explorer-6http-headers
Liam
Liam

Reputation: 20950

Blank page in IE6

A site I am working on that is built using PHP is sometimes showing a completely blank page. There are no error messages on the client or on the server. The same page may display sometimes but not others. All pages are working fine in IE7, Firefox 3, Safari and Opera. All pages are XHTML with this meta element:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />

It appears that I have fixed the problem by adding this PHP code:

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

I have read that this problem may be caused by XHTML, encoding, gzip compression, or caching, but nobody has been able to backup these guesses.

As the problem was intermittent I am not confident that my solution has actually solved the problem.

My question is, are there reproducible ways of having IE6 show a blank page when other browsers display content? If so, what causes it and what solves it?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2277

Answers (6)

eddy147
eddy147

Reputation: 4983

This is a content-type problem from IE. It does not know how to handle application/xhtml+xml.

Although you write xhtml+xml, IE only knows text+html. It will be the future before all agents know xhtml+xml

change your meta tag with content type to content="text/html;

Upvotes: 3

Baha14
Baha14

Reputation: 1

I got this bug due to a typing error.

I wrote the meta tag :

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-15" />

Thanks to you i corrected it to :

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

and i haven't the problem now.

Upvotes: 0

Greg Lane
Greg Lane

Reputation: 11

I had a similar problem that was language specific - only the page with multibyte characters didn't show in IE6 and IE7. Turns out in these two browsers, the order of the Content-Type meta tag and the title tag is a big deal. So putting the tag (which contained Japanese characters) after the meta tag fixed the problem.

Upvotes: 1

Mauricio
Mauricio

Reputation: 387

You should serve pages with the Content-Type header as text/html to IE users. You don't need to change the meta tag, just leave it as application/xhtml+xml (IE will ignore it).

Upvotes: 0

scunliffe
scunliffe

Reputation: 63616

Sounds like bug #153 "Self Closing Script Tag" bug in IE, which is well known to cause blank pages.

Due to IE's bug, you can NEVER code the following and expect it to work in IE.

<script src="...." />

(if the tag is self closing, you are in for a world of pain)

Instead, always code as;

<script src="...."></script>

Upvotes: 1

DOK
DOK

Reputation: 32851

Not sure if this exactly matches your experience. It depends on which specific version of IE (including service packs) is being used.

A known rendering issue with IE6 SP2 & IE7 (both use the same rendering engine) is the existence of orphaned tags in your HTML. This may be an orphaned div or script tag.

<script language="javascript">    // no closing tag
alert('hello world');
<body>
hello world
</body>

The above renders just fine in IE6 SP1 and Firefox, but you will only see a blank page in IE6 SP2 & IE7.

There are certain other tags that must have a separate closing tag. Check that any <div> and <script> tags have an ending </script> or <div> tag, not just a closing slash at the end of the opening tag. Another one is <textarea>. You have to have both tags.

You can test if this is occurring with your site if you can View Source of your blank page and get the source html even though your page is blank.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions