Topic: XHTML page started to display as XML-tree in IE

The site wortked fine using XHTML files with .htm extention.

I run into a problem after adding title attribute to A HREF tags and cleaning-up the keywords.
I do understand, that probably this is not the cause of the problem, but after changing the whole site I realized that all my pages started to display in IE as an XML-tree.

Please help me to get back to my previous state.

The site is in Russian, but coding is coding... right?

http://promo-ua.com/_index.htm
(his is the non-working version, at the promo-ua.com address now lays an old html-presentation).

P.S.: even using some not validated markup in XTML, such as marginheight e t.c. my pages used to work fine.

______________________________
Boris Khodorkovsky
PR & BTL agency «Success Formula»
http://promo-ua.com/

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

either get a logging proxy, or use httplook (free trial)
to see what content type your webserver is sending out - it might just be the wrong one, causing IE to display it as straight xml.

So long,

->Tyberius Prime

mactep: Yep I've had this kind of problem with IE and XHTML - when something goes wrong it can (for some reason) start parsing the page as XML. Two things that could be causing the problem:

1. Using special characters in the title (shouldn't be a problem as I use them in there but try taking them out).

2. Comments outside the HTML tags - I'm not sure what it might do but I doubt its wise.

Also correct the validation errors - it can't hurt :

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpromo-ua.com%2F_index.htm

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org | Justice for Pat Richard | FAQs: Emperor | Site Reviews | Reception Room

I don't really know why the problem appears, but after some tests I think I know what's causing it. The comment declaration after the XML declaration seems to do it. Probably because it contains some non-ASCII characters or something like that. Unfortunately, I don't have time to look further into it, and I don't know if this is a known problem.
Anyway, the simplest thing would be to just remove the comment declaration, or move it somewhere else.

HZR: I suspect its because the DOCTYPE doesn't specify that comments can be outside the HTML tag. I suspect some browsers will ignore it but some won't it appears.

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org | Justice for Pat Richard | FAQs: Emperor | Site Reviews | Reception Room

Well, comment declarations _can_ appear outside the HTML element, and this is not something the DTD (I think you meant that - not the DOCTYPE) can specify.

HZR: Ahhhhh right OK - I suppose the sign that it works fine in Opera and Moz is a sign its IE doing its own special weird thing

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org | Justice for Pat Richard | FAQs: Emperor | Site Reviews | Reception Room

The problem is that IE chokes on the xml declaration on the first line. It reads that and thinks its an xml file and starts to parse it. IE doesn't look at content headers from the server to determine what to do, it looks at file contents, which is why there has been a lot of problems lately.

The xml declaration is optional, so you can take it out and it should be fine.