[X4U] OT - Secure Web Page Validation Problem

[Milton van der Veen]

On Dec 18, 2005, at 4:42 PM, Eugene wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 10:17:05PM CST, Milton van der Veen  
> <miltonlist at hurontel.on.ca> wrote:
> :
> : I look after a web site for Sleeping Children Around the World. We
> : use PayPal for credit card donations and had to set up a sequence of
> : secure pages on our web site to handle that. We use our ISPs secure
> : server to save money.
> :
> : But I keep getting people using Firefox browser who tell me they're
> : getting the HTML code in their browser instead of the rendered page.
> : <https://host.zerowebhosting.com/scaw/secure/index.shtml>
> :
> [...]
> :
> : I've checked with my ISP and they assure me that their server is set
> : up correctly. They also tell me that the page is coded correctly.  
> But
> : I still get regular complaints ... especially now as the giving
> : season is here.
>
> Your ISP is run by morons.  Their web server is set up incorrectly.
> When a browser goes to your URL, it gets the following response  
> headers:
>
>> Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:29:45 GMT
>> Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix)
>> PHP/4.3.10 Rewrit/1.1a mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
>> Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:23:54 GMT
>> Etag: "21b013-3e8a-43a5007a"
>> Accept-Ranges: bytes
>> Content-Length: 16010
>> Content-Type: text/plain
>>
>> 200 OK
>
> The "Content-Type" header is set to "text/plain".  This means that the
> web server is telling your web browser that the following page is a
> plain text page.  If it was set up correctly, it would report an HTML
> page with a Content-Type of "text/html".
>
> So why is Firefox having problems?  It's not.  It's operating in a
> strict mode that tightly adheres to web standards.  Other browsers may
> be more fault-tolerant.  They accept the Content-Type as plain  
> text, but
> upon receiving the page they inspect the page contents.  If the deep
> inspection reveals that the page is actually an HTML document,  
> browsers
> internally mark the Content-Type as "text/html" and process it as an
> HTML document instead of a plain text page.

Thanks for the additional ammunition, Eugene. I can't find anywhere  
in my code where I declare the code as being plain text. But I have  
gone through my files and removed the "s" in the extension. Now, it  
seems to be working all right. Did I not have to go to the trouble?  
The link is now:
<https://host.zerowebhosting.com/scaw/secure/index.html>

And Firefox seems to be having no trouble with it now.

Milton