Page Shows as Blank in IE

elfhelm · Joined: 09 May 2006 Posts: 6

Now, I've had problems with Firefox before, but this is a first for me. I have recently created a new layout for my website, but it shows up as a blank page in IE while working perfectly in Firefox.

My code is horrendous, I know, but presently, I just need it to show up. Any ideas on what needs to be changed for it to be viewable in Internet Explorer (not that it exactly lines up in IE even when it was working...)?
The page:

http://geocities.com/elfhelm00/main.html

Oh, and none of the internal links are supposed to work, in case you were wondering.
Thanks so much.

kanenas · Joined: 14 Dec 2004 Posts: 310

The comment markers enclosing the header style combined with comments later in the document are confusing IE. You have "--!>"; replace it with "-->" so it looks like:

elfhelm · Joined: 09 May 2006 Posts: 6

Sweet, that fixed it, thanks. It's weird that I didn't catch that though - not that I would have known why it was wrong, but I was comparing the code to the former layout which didn't have that error. Thanks again.

kanenas · Joined: 14 Dec 2004 Posts: 310

It's such a small difference I'd be more surprised if you had caught it with a vdiff.

It would probably help to mention how I found the error (which wasn't by noticing the "--!>") so you can know how to fish.

I cut sections of the source until something started to show up, narrowing down which part of the source was preventing display. When I cut the last comment following the style sheet, IE displayed what remained of the page. This immediately led me to examine other comments in the page, at which point I noticed the "--!>".

The process is similar to that described in "Debugging CSS, the Easy Way" but applied to HTML rather than CSS, and I was trying to remove rather than keep the buggy code. The article suggests validating the source as the first step (a course I also endorse and took), but in this case the validation didn't catch the error in the comment. I used W3C's markup validator which will usually catch extraneous characters between an end-of-comment marker and a tag end marker, just not when the comment is masking the content of a (e.g.) style or script tag.

Druid · Joined: 22 Sep 2009 Posts: 1

I've tried crawling all over the page in my neophyte coding skill and I have no clue why it is now broken.

I tested it last week and it worked in IE. I have been going over our entire website trying to simplify the codes (a lot of this was built by other people of varying degrees of experience & skill), and I must have made a change that didn't affect the Firefox view, but caused the page to crap out in IE. I haven't noticed this problem on any of the other pages in IE. Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

http://futureaces.org/about_our_scholarships.php

(I know this uses some odd coding and I am working to remove the table format)

Thanks!

kanenas · Joined: 14 Dec 2004 Posts: 310

Don't threadjack. This thread is over 3 years old and has nothing to do with whatever issue you have.

Speaking of issues, what is yours? Your post gives no clue what the problem is. When describing a problem, say what you want to happen and what actually happens. Include the versions of software you tested. Does IE7 work? How about IE8? Read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" for more info on asking for help.