[Ham-Mac] ARRL.ORG - works now - BUT

[C.Mark Burlingame]

On Aug 3, 2005, at 2:28 PM, harris ruben wrote:

> I would have prefrred to know why it didn't work before -- not even in 
> Firefox.
> -- 
Hello Group,

Yeah, me too.  Sorry for the late entry, but I haven't had a chance to 
read the digests until lately.  Sorry also that this is kind of a long 
post, but trying to cover a lot of bases.

For what it's worth, I have exactly the same problems that Dick, N5XRD, 
had with Safari, FireFox, and Netscape 7.2 and I also have the problem 
with Camino.  IE5.2 displays the page just fine. Am running on OS-X 
10.3.9 with latest updates.  Firefox, Camino, and Netscape all use 
Mozilla technology.  I believe Safari is Apple proprietary.

Have tried the suggested fixes to no avail, and checked all the 
settings in all the browsers.  The problem has come and gone over the 
last couple of years, but currently it's back in force.  ARRL home page 
is not the only one I've had trouble with, but there aren't many 
others.  Most pages I visit render fine in all five browsers.

My connection is 56K dial-up, Dick's is DSL, so I agree that it's 
probably not a connection problem, especially since he can get the page 
to display in a newly created account.

If one views the page source (e.g. in Safari: View/View Source or 
pop-up View Source), all the HTML appears to be present, yet the 
browser displays neither text nor graphics.  Somehow the non-IE 
browsers are choosing not to render the content.  None of the obvious 
preference settings in any of the browsers seem to affect this 
behavior.  It would appear that either:

* a system-level setting or file corruption is affecting browser 
behavior, or
* the non-IE browsers all have some similar default configuration 
setting that inhibits rendering the ARRL and similar pages, or
* ???

The HTML source has some scripts that check the browser type/version 
and OS type.  These checks seem to be aimed at how to display something 
called "userMenu".  Perhaps there is some other interaction as well, 
but if so I can't tell what.  Perhaps someone out there can decipher it 
better than me?

And just to emphasize, it's not uniquely a Safari problem: the 
Mozilla-based browsers are affected as well.

Finally, I think it's important to understand the problem.  If 
reinstalling 10.3 with Archive and Install fixes the problem, then 
there's a good chance installing Tiger merely does the same thing 
without addressing the underlying cause.  The same problem could come 
back and some of us will be scratching our heads again.

Incidentally, reinstalling is not necessarily easy.  My base load CD is 
10.3.2, and bringing that back to latest 10.3.9 over a 56K dial-up link 
is very painful.  Still no DSL in the area, and the other options are 
too expensive, but that's another story.

73
Mark B.