ie/netscape difference

Anon

I've just moved to a new ISP that apparently supports php4. I've created a file called index.php - in IE5 it renders fine, in netscape all i get is the html source.

any ideas

Anon

Your ISP may not have set apache (it's using apache+PHP, right?) to handle the .php file extension.

Make sure they have this line in their httpd.conf file

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

For some reason, IE doesn't care. I had a similar problem on a new server some time ago. I couldn't figure out why Netscape would only show source for files with the .html extension but IE would -- and then I saw that I hadn't told apache that .html (only .htm is enabled by default I think) was in fact an HTML file.

I feel about 95% sure that your ISP just needs to tweak their httpd.conf to recognize the .php extension. Contact them and see what they say about that; they may be very willing to do it or they may be hesitant and tell you to use some other extension.

In the meantime, try another extension like .php3 or .phtml to see if those might be valid in their current setup of apache+PHP.

Anon

??? Strange.. PHP is server side, it shouldn't make any difference what browser is visiting the server.

Perhaps your ISP has a typical configuration used for headers, Netscape is very particular about headers (and should!) while IE doesn't care much (while it should!).

Also, perhaps you can show us an example of what your script file looks like.

Anon

That's just it. IE doesn't seem to care what it's sent so long as it can read what's between the tags. Netscape apparently relies on the server to find out if the extension of the file is renderable HTML or just plain text.

Try it - copy and rename some static HTML file on your webserver with the extension .abc instead of .html

Call it up in IE. It should render fine (I found that it ignores SSI of course since the server does not know to parse SSI in .abc files).

Now call it up in Netscape. You should get the source code.

Now if you have access to your apache config, add this line in

AddType text/html .abc

and restart the server, and Netscape should render the file correctly.

Anon

I agree what you say, however I've also learned that a simple something like sending a proper html header, could give problems in Netscape.

Therefor, not only check the .conf files, but also php.ini to see what kind of header is send.

But it might as well be the script Paul is trying itself.

A script without (or with wrong) headers might just as well give you the same problems.

Anon

IE likes to "sniff" the incoming file to find out what contents are in it and then do what it THINKS is the right thing. I have run into this problem when trying to "force" downloads of text files with HTTP headers. IE 4.x sniffs the file, sees that it is text and says "I can display that"... so it does. In that case I had to trick it by sending it some unknown made-up header type first.

Anyways, The reason we have file associations in browsers is so the browser CAN do different things with different file types when the headers are sent. It would be a bad day when we had to rely on the browsers to sniff the files to decide what to do with them.

Tim Frank