Important note: I am not an expert in HTML or computers. Please explain things in simple terms.
Context: I have a large number of files that I’ve organized using very basic HTML. I put all of the files in one area, I give each a simple .HTM name, and I create indexes based on various ways I want to organize them (numerical, alphabetic, by origin, by date, by size, specialized categories, etc). Everything has been working fine for years and the size of the file collection grew, along with the index files.
Then a couple of weeks ago, some of the index files stopped working. I can still open them but when I do so, the page is dead; none of the links work, including those that link within the page itself. I can’t even use something like Control-F or the scroll bar to move around in the page.
I don’t thing it’s just an issue of the size of the files. They’re big but I have bigger files that are still working fine. And it’s just the three biggest indexes; smaller sub-indexes are still working fine.
So one possibility I’ve considered is that I crossed some kind of threshold and now have too many links in these main index pages and that’s shut them all down. I’ve done a little searching online and I’ve found guides that say you should avoid putting too many links on a single page but these seem to be style guidelines rather than actual technical limits. And they’re saying you shouldn’t put more than a hundred links on single page and I’ve gone far beyond that (I’ve never counted them but these pages have around 25,000 links apiece).
To give some technical details, I’ve used real bare bones HTML. Mainly (A HREF=) and (A NAME=") commands (I switched to parentheses in this post).
It sounds like you and I both build hobbyist websites for our hobbies. I have a page with over 33,000 links! It works fine.
One possibility is that your last edit left an unmatched something ( ", ', <, <table, ?) which made the remainder of the file gibberish to the browser.
Not really comfortable with that idea. These files are where I store all of my personal information. I’m okay doing it because everything is on a separate hard drive with a back-up and I can keep both in my possession. The index pages in question are just massive lists of the file names but it’s still not something I want floating around out there.
Another factor is the size of these files. The big indexes in question are all well over a megabyte.
I feel that’s not the problem. I have some text files which are larger than the index files and they’re working fine.
No, the only browser I use is standard Google Chrome. Having a Windows computer, I have Edge and IE stuck in my computer but I never use them. I suppose I could try them out but in my experience, using Microsoft products usually just adds to your computer problems.
No, for the reasons I gave in my previous post.
I don’t think so. See below.
These files were all hand-typed. We’re talking real basic stuff.
Here’s essentially what the program is (in an extremely abbreviated form and with braces replacing the angles).
{HTML}
{PRE}
Alphabetical index
{A HREF=“#a”}A{/A}-{A HREF=“#b”}B{/A}
That’s discouraging. Because the theory that I had too many links was the best one I had. If that’s not the problem, I’m out of ideas.
That’s a possibility and I have looked for things like that. But I think it’s strange that some random typos would have affected all three main indexes at the same time and in the same way.
To clarify on my previous response regarding Javascript, I don’t know Javascript and did not knowingly use any of that language. But I acknowledge the possibility that in my ignorance of that language I might have accidentally written in a Javascript command without realizing it and my computer is trying to run it.
As Septimus said, in your previous edit you forgot to close a bracket or something else.
Windows machine with external drives? Did perhaps a drive letter change?
For a project like this, I would use Git locally to version this file. That way you could roll back to the last version if you had any doubt about it. That doesn’t solve your problem today, but it would have helped determine if it were due to a particular edit.
idk any practical size limit for an HTML file, but you’re right this is enormous. Like it makes me wonder if the parser just crapped itself and quit rendering.
I hate to be the guy who says “Why are you doing this”, but OP, why are you doing this?
Anyway, a useful suggestion would be to look at the parts of the file that appear to be broken, and reconstruct a tiny index of just those particular entries. If those work, maybe you did indeed hit some limit that none of us have seen before, and you know you need to break this thing up into smaller chunks.
Just to clarify, Little Nemo. It sounds like your webpages are NOT actually hosted anywhere on the Internet; they just reside on your machine. Is that correct? In other words, you’re using the features of hyper-text and a Web browser just so you personally have a nice interface for viewing your own data.
No complaints from me about that! I do exactly the same thing. Indeed putting most of my data up on the public 'Web started almost as an afterthought. (And to post images on Facebook, I usually upload to a private directory at my site and then just post a link on Facebook; this avoids Facebook’s unfriendly protocol.)