Firefox vrs IE character encoding problem

trying to assist my sister at work she has a PC running Firefox and a coworker's PC running IE. She tries to look at some town ordinances website and it works fine in IE but all of a sudden, it stopped loading the .gifs (scanned stuff) returning the 'x' icon of a misloaded picture.

the website seems to be coded in .asp (active server pages) if that makes a difference.

I troubleshooted it a bit and found that for some reason, firefox is not decoding the URL of the image correctly and hence, returns the bad image icon. When I found the URL of the image via IE, I was able to compare that to what firefox was trying to load (via the right click context menu 'view image) and what firefox seems to be loading is an incorrect URL. For some reason, when firefox decodes the URL, it adds a bunch of inappropriate characters and hence, fails to load a bunch of images.

Upon looking at what firefox tried to load, it added something like "%BD%BE%BF" to the image between the base name and the .gif extension, I found that if I viewed the image and then manually deleted that, the .gif would load properly. For example, in firefox when I viewed the image URL it would be something like:

http://www.ordinances]ordinance.com - Your single source for up to date and accurate zoning and land use information and maps........[snip]picture1%BD%BE%BF.gif

However, it should be the

http://www.ordinances]ordinance.com - Your single source for up to date and accurate zoning and land use information and maps........[snip]picture1.gif

I tried changing firefox's character encoding and tried everything that seemed to make any sense, from UTF-8 to UTF-16 and tried all the western european ISO character sets. The IE was set to (Western European ISO).

Nothing worked.. Is this a problem with the HTML developer or is this a problem with firefox now??? It used to work fine up to a certain point and I don't know what the website changed... Should I have her contact the website developer to see if they can correct it. I bet firefox is somehow reading something into the picture links it shouldn't be and then not knowing how to convert that to a character. That's my experience with seeing the %XX characters in places, usually it's a character conversion problem.

Jay

Re: Firefox vrs IE character encoding problem

If the "%BD%BE%BF" is visible in the page's View Source, it's more likely on the server side, since the browser is unlikely to insert the extra stuff in that case. (A difference in character encoding would still mean that there would be something before the ".gif" in IE -- except that there might be some "invisible" characters. You might be able to compare the file lengths if you save the HTML from both browsers.) If the Source looks good, but when you try to load the page, the image objects themselves are trying to load the wrong URL, then that points to the browser.

You should try another copy of Firefox, maybe on the machine with IE that works.

Re: Firefox vrs IE character encoding problem

%BD, %BE and %BF are urlencoded characters for ½, ¾, and ¿ respectively, which have no business being in a filename. These kinds of things usually occur when a document or file is taken from a Mac and then copied to a PC, because the character translation tables sometimes differ on the systems depending on the font, and what might be a hidden character on a Mac becomes a visible one on the PC.

The most probably reason why it works in IE but not in Firefox is that IE tends to ignore things it doesn't understand, while Firefox wants to let you know it's broken so you'll fix it.

Re: Firefox vrs IE character encoding problem

thanks guys, I can relay this info to my sister and see what she says... Its not that big a deal, since she can always install IE just to look at that website when she does but I got her into using Firefox and Eudora a long time ago so she likes that browser as well. I didn't think about viewing the source when i was there so I don't know what that looks like both of your explanations sound plausible so I can pass that on...

Thanks,
jay

Re: Firefox vrs IE character encoding problem

Add the plugin for Firefox that allows you to open an IE tab within Firefox. That way she can use Firefox for everything, but opt to open up that particular site in IE without leaving Firefox.