I have been analyzing the data that I have been collecting and I have drawn a few conclusions. I noticed that a large majority of the errors that I have been getting are coming from windows Vista computers running IE 8 or Firefox 3. There where also a few cases where it was Vista and IE 7. This could explain why the errors are now just becoming an issue as more and more people are using the new operating system.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GoogleT5; MSN Optimized;CA; MSN Optimized;CA)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; Media Center PC 5.0)
But anyways the conclusion that I want to get at is that based on this information I started looking into how the browsers process java scripts and if there was anything new that could be causing this issue, that’s when something interesting pop out at me, I found on the w3School website an article about the difference in html vs. xhtml.
Differences between HTML and XHTML
HTML 4 and XHTML deal different with the content inside scripts:
- In HTML 4, the content type is declared as CDATA, which means that entities will not be parsed.
- In XHTML, the content type is declared as (#PCDATA), which means that entities will be parsed.
This means that in XHTML, all special characters should be encoded or all content should be wrapped inside a CDATA section.
To ensure that a script parses correctly in an XHTML document, use the following syntax:
So I immediately took a look into my code and I saw that the DOCTYPE directive was missing on some of my pages the sameones that are causing the Issue. I also noticed that where I was outputting JavaScript using the .NET Register Client Script routine it would wrap the inner content of the script tags with the CDATA attribute, while where there was the regular JavaScript written on the page there was no CDATA used. For example
<script language=”javascript”>
Function RunMe() {
}
</script>
I am no expert on how browser’s renders or parse the html return, but I strongly believe it has some thing to do with the situation above because the Url parameter in the Script Resource request whenever it crashes always contains code in between script tags that's below it. Some times there is even html style sheet code that can be found there as well. For example
http://braun.factoryoutletstore.com/ScriptResource.axd?d=70kBR-jPBTx9R89FxObjhipHPS9CMlta5W6ZZiqkaa5zNOXUU4DtsY8V_8function runSearchForField(eventObj, id){ if ((eventObj.which == 13) || (eventObj.keyCode == 13)) { var cat_gallery = getParam('gallery'); var cat = getParam('cat') var searchTerm = escape(document.getElementById(id).value); // must use escape() function to urlencode search term to avoid issues with '&' and '=' symbols var url; if (cat_
http://braun.factoryoutletstore.com/ScriptResource.axd?d=9vS7Hk65j_0hD8to_aPDj <tr> <td class=
Now what am thinking is that some how because am not specifying any DOCTYPE in the page the browser might be trying to infer based on the data its receiving then it ends up messing up because sometimes there is CDATA and there are times when there is no CDATA present in the page. I don’t know really if this is a solid assumption cause as they say assumptions as dangerous. If anyone can shade some light on my theory and let me know if the browsers are parsing the xhtml differently that older version or even if they had any similar situations.
JamTech
Bjorn Williams
bwilliams@gogotech.com