[Gllug] Is it just me or is www.hmce.gov.uk broken?

[Ian Northeast]

Mark Hill wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 10, 2004 at 10:16:47AM +0100, John Winters wrote:
> 
>>On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 10:03, Robert P. McKenzie wrote:
>>
>>>John Winters wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>When I try to access http://www.hmce.gov.uk/ I get redirected to a
>>>>portal site but for some reason Firefox doesn't recognize it as HTML
>>>
>>Interesting - can anyone see *why* Firefox doesn't like it?
> 
> 
> From using lynx with the site, I think the redirected URL is a gzip
> compressed text file. Can IE handle such things, or is this site
> having a bad day? 

It's the "Content-Type: text/plain" it's sending on the 200. It should 
be "text/html".

IE will typically ignore the Content-Type header, i.e. it will appear to 
work because it ignores the HTTP standard. Firefox and my Mozilla are 
behaving correctly.

I've seen this before with an Apache caching proxy in front of an Oracle 
iFS server. iFS would deliver the page correctly the first time, and 
then when it sent its "not modified" in response to a subsequent 
conditional GET, tack on an unnecessary Content-Type with the wrong 
type, causing Apache to update its cache and serve the page incorrectly 
thereafer. It always "worked" with IE but not with any Mozilla flavour. 
I'm not saying this is an iFS server - I don't think it is as IIRC iFS 
at least generated fairly tidy looking HTML.

I'm behind one of NTL's so-called "transparent" caches and normally I'd 
suspect them of causing any web trouble, but I've never seen them do 
this one and evidently it's happening to everyone.

It only gets delivered gzipped if the browser sends "Accept-Encoding: 
gzip". If I request it from Mozilla it comes gzipped, if I use telnet 
and just put in the minimum it comes in plain. This isn't the problem.

The site is broken.

Regards, Ian






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