We have two customers who have their site hosted on our Win2k servers. For some reason the websites are not viewable using the AOL browser. However, you can view the websites just fine using Internet Explorer and Netscape. Are there any special settings I need to change on IIS or the server itself to make the sites viewable using AOL Browser?

Aol has said that that or domain name for that host needs to be resetup? I've never heard of such a thing? is there any truth to this IIS story or is aol just tell customers this because their browser doesn't suppor the latests codes?

I am an MCSE and have never heard of anything like that. It might be true, I am not very experienced with IIS, but to be honest with you I really think this is all a BIG HUGE LIE because their browsers suck and do not support the code.

You likely have HTML problems. IE is very forgiving of very bad HTML.

Pages without closing BODY tags and so forth work on IE but not on Netscape (AOL).

I've seen this problem all the time. If it is the case, then it has NOTHING to do with your server... it has to do with your web pages (HTML, ASP, whatever). They need to be fixed.

When you say "NetScape browser" you do know that there are dozens and dozens of platforms and versions? 4.07,4.08,4.60,4.61,4.71... etc,etc,etc.
They all have their own share of bugs and problems. Often I trace down such problems to certain HTML constructs that have problems.

You might be talkign about the AOL browser (I think the name is "IWING" or something?) that they used to provide. But the same idea applies. Just because HTML works on the version of IE and Nestcape Communicator you tested... doesn't mean your HTML is valid.

If I had to estimate, 60% or more HTML pages on the Internet have one problem or anothe with their Syntax. Most browsers just deal with it. Some browsers like Opera 3.x are not so forgiving... but they have had to care in recently given that so much HTML is poorly written.

Not surprising to find two of your customers with the problem...

Have you looked at the HTML of their home page? Neat and tidy HTML or a big honking mess out of something like Microsoft Frontpage? Lots of javascript and other garbage?

StephenRS is right on.

Bad HTML
We had a similar problem with a client. They were using pre-release version of Netscape 4, which had terrible time rendering tables that had mistakes. An unclosed td tag would cause the entire page not to show up. Use W3Cs or CSE's HTMLValidator to check the code. Most likely there is a mistake.



Headers
Make sure you are not sending any custom headers in the IIS configuration. If you've never changed this, it should be ok.


Browser Preview Utilities
Does anybody know of any browser preview utilities that actually work? We manually check our sites on Windows and Mac using Netscape, IE, and AOLs browser as we have found this to be the only reliable method. I have seen some preview utilties but many of them only provide snapshots of the screen and cannot do link testing etc?

Well that's what i told the client, but he is more content to believe the lying AOL people. so i guess we will leave it at that.

If you are willing to tell us the web page of the client, I am willing to look at it and see if I can find problems with the HTML...

www.bektone.com they claim no images will load though the AOL browser

Ok,

First off, I'm not trying to offend you or your customer, just trying to help.

I don't have a AOL browser handy, so I can't rework the page and test it...

However, I see many flaws in the HTML. Most of which will likely even get past the AOL browser, but I've seen them at one time or another cause problems.

This page is typical of "junk HTML" pages.

1. The JAVASCRIPT is in between the HEAD and BODY, it is supposed to be in the HEAD section. I doubt this is it, but it is a "problem".
2. There are all kinds of tables to do layout that could likely be done much much much easier without tables. Tables upon tables upon tables. No wonder they have HTML problems.
3. There are fonts that exist only on certain Windows systems. Comic Sans MS for example. Most browsers are OK with this, but still not a good idea.
4. AWAY TOO many empty table data tags that have forced height and width.
5.... many more

Likely what is causing the problems:
#4 -- rows and rows and rows of empty table tags:
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">
</TD><TD height="21">

I found no obvious mistmatched tags, other than some I and B that were intertwined. http://watson.addy.com/ found those.

But in general, sometimes these crazy FORCED height table tags will cause problems for many browsers. Often this is from crappy "drag and drop HTML editors".

All these waste tags make it nearly impossible to find REAL problems.

I could go on and on, I don't have any more time today, I can try and look more later. Sorry I don't have more time.

Bottom Line with the time I have
==========================
home page is very important, I would really encourage this customer to pay (or beg) someone into redoing this page with much cleaner HTML A good HTML person should be able to do this in under 1 hours, maintain the same appearance and be able to cut at least 30% of the text from the page (faster download and bandwidth savings).

Tell them to find a web guy who works in Notepad... not some facy drag/drop HTML editor (like they used).

It is pages like this that exactly cause the problems you describe.

Again, sorry for the terse answer.

As I have encountered AOL problems in the past, I took a look at the code.

Bad HTML
One issue is the use of the ampersand & and not &amp;. This can break some browsers. The ampersand should be escaped in HTML. This was known to break early versions of Netscape but IE handles it.

All of the AOL rendering problems I have faced in the past five years have always been HTML issues. Or using non-approved HTML attributes.


Validation
I used the CSE HTML Validator which produced 14 serious errors and 1 warning. Serious errors include things like: the unescaped ampersand, use of valign in the img tag, script tag in the wrong place, etc. Tell your clients they can can a free demo version of the validator at:

http://www.htmlvalidator.com

I believe it will save the results as an HTML file, which you could show them -- just be nice, don't say your HTML sucks. ;)

Drag/Drop Design Editors
Most inexpensive (aka cheap) drag and drop editors do a terrible job at writing cross-platform HTML. These include even popular titles such as HomeSite and FrontPage.

Some of the more professional programs, e.g. Dreamweaver, GoLive, do a moderate job of writing cost-platform code, but less expensive programs rarely can do the job. I have seen Dreamweaver and Golive pages fail the cross-platform test as well, though the are getting better.

I do ColdFusion development, so I use Coldfusion studio, but I've never used its drag and drop design features -- they never work as well as coding by hand. We do all of our design mock-ups in Quark, Illustrator or Photoshop and then code everything be hand. This way we produce small, clean pages that tend to work cross-platform.

excellent, i will show this to my client, so he can stop putting faith in the "magic" AOL servers. :-)

ckizer --

One thing to explain to your customes. IT isn't just AOL people that are having problems with his web pages.

THe reason why he is only hearing from AOL people -- well, that is pretty easy to explain.

AOL has the most "consumer oriented" people -- and he has a consumer oriented site. In other words, they are the largest group that he is breaking because of the technical problems with his HTML (web pages).

I bet if you study his traffic stats, AOL is one of your largest hits - if not the largest.

my client just sent me this, and he is right. any clues??/



The flaw in your logic is that AOL sees an exact duplicate of the site perfectly on another server. I'll investigate what you have written here but I don't think the issue is in the HTML.

If you want to try it yourself. Visit http://64.60.61.195/ on an AOL browser and you will find AOL has no problem.

That is not the same customer page you posed earlier, it wasn't an Attorney... I think it was a bridal shop.

yeah i know, i'm sorry. they are both having these problems.

To compare them, need both server links :)

Okay here is the duplicate of the site on a different host and he claims it works in aol

http://64.60.61.195/


here is the site on my server

http://64.23.89.158

Any clues on "what works" means? The Bridal shop you said images don't appear...

In this case, since their are frames... it is important to know EXACTLY what appears and does not appear.

Take a look at the source on the main frame.

64.60.61.195: He/she has some JavaScript above the <html> tag. I would bet that if they put it in the <head> tag the page would work. I am amazed that this page shows up in any NS browser.

Regards
~Chas

okay i've got this all wrong, that's not the issue, if he puts this in via ip everything loads, if he puts it in by domain name nothing loads, aols machines aren't seeing the dns but every other machien on the net it. why is this???

I wanted to help, but you have used up all the time I had. Sorry, I can't help further on this one.

Stephen, thanks for all you did, sorry that i wasted so much of your time!! :-) I owe you a beer. :-)

Can you ask the customer to try a tracert from their machine? What kind of error do they get from AOL? Is it specific to their PC or have they been getting complaints from other people? It really sounds like a DNS problem at AOL if it can be seen by everyone else.