Netscape, named anchors and PHP

Anon

Here's the situation...

Dynamically generated page:
sections.php?section=mixer

this page has dynamically generate named anchors in it:
<a name='Mack'>

Now when I use Netscape's back arrow to return to a page where I had clicked on an anchor link
(sections.php?section=mixer#Mack)
my image map is broke and so are my anchor links.

How do I fix this??
It doesn't appear that my variable $section is being set to "mixer#Mack", so I'm at a real loss since this is a Netscape only thing but I can't find any documentation on it or a work around.

To experience the problem go to http://www.brownequipment.com/sections.php
then click on one of links above the data, then hit refresh and you'll notice that the nav on the left no longer functions.

HELP!!!!

Anon

Did you fix it? I was checking it out and it all of a sudden started working just fine...

Anon

Were you using Netscape 4.x?

Anon

Netscape Communicator 4.75.

The first time I did it, I saw what you were talking about. Since your side menu is an image map, my suspicion was that something on the reload was causing the script to end before the image map (that you output at the bottom of the page source) could be output so it was not getting to the browser.

When I went back through the sequence again, it started working, so I couldn't verify my theory with the view-source command.

I would suggest that you check the resulting html with a syntax checker of some kind. My experience has been that whenever someone says "it is only broken in Netscape" the problem is usually non-standards compliant html. Netscape 4.x is much stricter than IE. IE will usually tolerate html errors where Netscape will not.

-- Rich Rijnders
-- Irvine, CA US

Anon

Well the strange thing is that it does work fine when using Netscape 6.01

Anon

That's because Netscape 6.01 went the route of MS and made thier browser more tolerant of bad html. That's the main reason that I haven't updated my browser; I would rather know right away if my html is bad and not rely on browsers to guess what I wanted to do with it.

-- Rich Rijnders
-- Irvine, CA US

Anon

Well I've inspected the generated code and it's not flawed. All tags are closed, everything's in order.

I did do a little testing though.
If I manually take out the # symbol in the URL and hit refresh it works just fine.

So somehow the presence of the # symbol is messing stuff up. Unfortunately I have no way of checking for it using PHP as within the PHP script the # symbol and anything after it isn't recognized.