Pointing The Finger in the Wrong Place

[Jason Dunn]

As regular readers of this site will know, we don't hold back on criticising Microsoft or pointing out flaws, bugs, and issues with our beloved Pocket PCs. Well, a while back I <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14108">posted a message complaining about a "bug"</a> in Pocket Internet Explorer. This went up the chain at Microsoft, and I was talking to the Pocket Internet Explorer Program Manager, and then to a tester who wanted to nail down the bug so it could get fixed. Talk about responsiveness! Cool.<br /><br />But, uh, it turns out that it was a bug in our coding that was causing the issue. 8O Whoops. :oops: So I'd like to apologize to the fine people on the Pocket Internet Explorer development team for assigning blame to them where it didn't belong.<br /><br />Now let's talk about how slow Pocket Internet Explorer is at rendering HTML... :lol:

[Mike Temporale]

I'm glad you guys have things worked out, and a special thanks to the PIE team @ Microsoft for helping you trouble shot your sites code. ;)

Seriously, it's nice to see how dedicated they are to the product. :way to go:

[dh]

We all like to bash MS from time to time. It's often good to be reminded that there are many talented, customer oriented people working there.

[Gerard]

So, um, speaking of site-specific PIE problems... is there any hope that the glitch which prevents me from seeing anything but big, empty ALT boxes with little 'x's inside, here, in the Thoughts forums? I see all images in the front page mobile version, and if I modify my registry to see the main page for IE, I see all images there in this iPAQ 3835 too. But in the threads themselves, it looks like this:

http://www.luthier.ca/other/forum/ppct_no_buttons_error.gif

It's been like this for me since the last big forum upgrade. I feel fairly certain that it's not intended as a 'feature' for non-subscribers, right? Avatars display all the time, as do banners, but most 'buttons' don't show up at all. The empty placeholders are so very large that it results in vast side-scrolling in PIE, making it difficult for me to justify visiting the forums much. Just takes way too long to read a post, and I get a bit dizzy from all the jumping side-to-side.

This also happened about a week ago on Brighthand. There was no formal announcement of a major change in page encoding, but I'm guessing that since Brighthand still renders okay in IE6 that this is some error introduced with a minor forum software update, which affects only Pocket IE. Can you confirm this, you gurus of the upper echelons? I'm really quite badly affected by it, and already my participation in Brighthand has dropped off by about 75% or more, just because it's far too hard to browse threads that way. I could tap on the View Printable Version link for every thread, but then I'd still have to go back to the normal, badly rendered version to reply.

I considered the possibility that this might be some obscure registry error in my iPAQ. I spent a lot of time testing things, using ancient backup registries (from dates when I know Brighthand was rendering all images and icons correctly) to overwrite the current one. I also did some changes manually with the current registry. I even did one hard reset/total from-scratch rebuild a few weeks ago, and saw no change for the better here on Thoughts. It's definitely not in my registry, this error. Anyway, that'd make no sense, even if I weren't an acknowledged registry wizard. How could it possibly be that dozens or hundreds of avatar and banner GIF images load correctly in a forum, but buttons for Reply and Post New Thread do not? And it is THE SAME EXACT PROBLEM, here and on Brighthand, but not on PocketPCPassion, not on PocketLoft, and not on CEWindows.net. So I am completely baffled.

Even more puzzling is that I've seen not one other user complaining of this. It could be I missed a thread, sure. But more likely is that, as Jason and other webmasters have reminded me numerous times, I am one of a miniscule handful of users (I think there are 6 or 7 of us, if some forum hosts are too be believed) who actually use Pocket IE exclusively, shunning a PC for web browsing. I test the odd error on IE6, just to confirm or refute the origins. I also use IE to get those free LIT books of late, and for service packs/bugfixes for my girlfriend's notebook so she won't get hammered by a virus, and I guess very rarely to access some Java-dependent site. But all that is about 1% of my web browsing. Everything else I do on this funky old 3835. And it'd be sweet if folks would keep their HTML in line, so it wasn't an escalating nightmare trying to go to my favourite places!

That said, I fully acknowledge the possibility that I am (as Jason did with this Microsoft example) placing the blame in the wrong arena. It could be, very slightly possibly, my doing. I just have no idea how. Any ideas? Anyone else having this problem?

[JustinGTP]

I get a similar problem,

the images that I cannot see on this website is the "Post New Topic" and "reply to topic" and some other images. The rest, however works, even avatars like my dog photo and Svens wierd ant thing.

-Justin.

I have a 2215

[Janak Parekh]

Gerard,

FWIW, it's not you. ;) Here's one relevant example:

&lt;img src="templates/Aurora/images/lang_english/icon_profile.gif" alt="View user's profile" title="View user's profile" border="0" />

If you put the URL fully into PIE's address bar, it does load. So, it's having trouble parsing that IMG tag. Confusing. :? I'll have to split it into a separate HTML file and see what's going on.

The irony is that we use a different webboard engine than BH...

--janak

[Gerard]

One thing about that image URL; the presence of an end-tag before the end of the tag. I use those all the time for br tags, as this is said to be compliant with HTML 4.01. But in an image tag? Really? I've seen a lot of formally published HTML specifications, and have never run across the requirement for an end-tag within an img string. Try getting rid of the space and forward slash at the end of all that, and see if it works in your pages. I wonder if that's the whole issue? Have to go over to Brighthand and see if they are using something like that too...

[Janak Parekh]

Nope, that's not it; we use it for the avatars too, and PIE renders those. I believe you can legally close any such tag inline like that a la XML in HTML 4.01.

--janak

[MadAxeMan]

Yeah, that's valid (X)HTML.

You could try changing the url to "/forums/templates/Aurora/images/lang_english/icon_profile.gif" and see if that helps.

Otherwise check your web logs and see what the request looks like.

[Janak Parekh]

You could try changing the url to "/forums/templates/Aurora/images/lang_english/icon_profile.gif" and see if that helps.
That's not it either -- the avatar images are prefixed off of forums and they still work fine.

Otherwise check your web logs and see what the request looks like.
Yeah, this is probably the easiest thing to do. I'll let you know if I find something.

--janak

[Janak Parekh]

FYI, all the Windows vs. Linux security debate posts have been moved here (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=17732).

--janak

[qmrq]

Nope, that's not it; we use it for the avatars too, and PIE renders those. I believe you can legally close any such tag inline like that a la XML in HTML 4.01.
This is required for a well formed XHTML document.. you can't be compliant with the standard without closing all tags. However this is forbidden in the HTML 4.01 spec.

[qmrq]

I've seen a lot of formally published HTML specifications, and have never run across the requirement for an end-tag within an img string.
This is required for a well-formed XHTML document.. all tags must be closed.

[jage]

Talking about HTML mistakes, what about non-terminated A tag (> missing) on Pocket PC Thoughts main page in the first &lt;NOSCRIPT> element? And those XHTML-style &lt;BR /> tags are everywhere but other empty tags like IMG, META, AREA, LINK, etc. are never "/>" terminated? And no doctype or charset definition?

[Kevin Daly]

That's not it either -- the avatar images are prefixed off of forums and they still work fine.

Otherwise check your web logs and see what the request looks like.
Yeah, this is probably the easiest thing to do. I'll let you know if I find something.

--janak

This is just a wild guess...but is it possible it can't handle the underscores?

[wxrman]

is it my imagination, or did Microsoft quietly include animated gif support in the 2003 upgrade?

[Jason Dunn]

is it my imagination, or did Microsoft quietly include animated gif support in the 2003 upgrade?

We've been discussing it here for a while now, so I don't know how "quiet" it is. Animated GIFs are supported, which is good, but they don't support transparency on animated GIFs, which is very, very bad. :cry:

[ctmagnus]

Animated GIFs are supported, which is good, but they don't support transparency on animated GIFs, which is very, very bad. :cry:

Although, depending on the site and the transparency colour, some appear to be transparent.

[Steven Cedrone]

You know, it's funny...

There are tons of sites out there that jump all over Microsoft at the drop of a hat, yet very few that will place a retraction out there at all (certainly not on the front page, if anything it's "buried" somewhere)...

Steve