OK, I’m working on redesigning my site. I have a test page up which still has plenty of design tweaking issues, but I have a more serious problem. My Flash works in IE, but not in Firefox. Here’s a test page:
Now, cross-browser compatibility is important for me. If I can’t get this to work in Flash in Mozilla, then I’ll probably scrap the whole flash filmstrip thing. (I used a Dreamweaver Component called “Imageweaver” to create the slideshow.)
Anybody have any ideas how to fix this or know where to ask?
IE just loaded up the correct file (the first named, “kerntest.swf”) and seemed to have completely glossed over the call for NONEXISTANTFILENAME.swf. Mozilla 404’ed. I wonder why that was.
Good call on the find. If you don’t know it already, right-clicking and choosing “View Page Info” in Firefox will show a list of all forms, links and media used on a page. Very helpful.
As to why it worked in IE, IE’s parsing engine accepts some pretty horrible bastardizations of HTML. My favourite is given a file in directory “weddings” (to keep your theme), if you say you have an image “weddings/someone.gif”, IE will check for “weddings/weddings/someone.gif” (which is where you said it was), but load “weddings/someone.gif” if that fails.
(Not that I think this is good - it’s a PITA when people publish HTML that makes you cringe 'cause it works for them in IE. :-/)
That’s good to know! Didn’t know the Firefox thing either. Here’s another quick question that you or someone might know the answer to:
Last night I drove myself batshit insane trying to figure out why when I uploaded my gallery it didn’t work on the server, while it did work locally (from my C: drive). Of course, the usual suspect is directory structure. However, there were no site-specific directory’s—they all worked off the root directory.
What I did find was this: some of my files had .jpg extensions. Others had .JPG extensions. Running it off the C drive, it wasn’t case sensitive. Running it off my webpage, it became case-sensitive. As soon as I changed all my .JPGs to .jpgs, all was good.
Now, why is this? Is it that Windows is not case-sensitive, while whatever OS my webhosting service is using is? I guess that would make sense.
puly: That’s usually a server specific option. Most servers require case-sensitive extensions, but some don’t. Regardless, it’s a good idea to make sure the extensions are proper, just in case your page grows so big you need to switch servers and your new server is case sensitive where your other wasn’t.
Also, on the Flash issue, IE has weird issues caching Flash movies, so if it worked, then you switched filenames, it could still work where Firefox caches them a little “better”, in my experience. Flash is one of those things that should work identically over all browsers, although you have to make sure the code that loads the Flash is proper.
It certainly wasn’t a cache issue (which I did check), because the imcompatibility was pointed out to me by a third-party who had never loaded the page before. It didn’t work in Firefox, so he tried IE, and it did work. Same happened with me when I tried it. As soon as I changed the second filename to match the first, it worked in all browsers. So obviously IE is parsing the code a little differently than Mozilla.
Yup. I host my site on a Unix server, and its pathnames and filenames are case sensitive. Which is why in URLs everything after the server name (i.e. past the third slash) should be considered case-sensitive.
To be safe I use only lower-case in pathnames and filenames.