Blank page problem fixed by removing CHARSET meta?

  • I’ve had no problems (other that the generic & sundry ones already reported) running the unmodified 1.2-beta on my 2003 server using IIS 6.0 and PHP 4.3.6. All viewing done in IE 6. My site is https://www.blipnet.net, and if you want to see the file in question, it’s at https://www.blipnet.net/archives.zip
    I wanted to have an ‘archives’ page that only showed wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly’), the search box and php wp_list_cats(), so I copied INDEX.PHP over to a new file called ARCHIVES.PHP
    This worked perfectly: in ARCHIVES.PHP, I removed the block that starts with <div id=”content”> and ends with the </div> that comes after ‘Sorry, no posts matched your criteria, and changed <div id=”menu”> to <div id=”content”>. It looks clean, no unmmatched <divs> as far as I can see.
    However, when I removed the the blocks of li and /li’s that contain the ‘Other’ and ‘Meta’, ARCHIVES.PHP would sometimes load with a totally blank page. (Totally blank = ‘view source’ in the browser shows NOTHING.)
    Even weirder (to me), if I got a blank page and manually refreshed the browser, it would reload fine and show everything. Woah!
    I eventually figured out that the times the page loaded blank, it wasn’t getting past the META/CHARSET line. I commented that line out and now ARCHIVES.PHP works perfectly, 100% of the time. I didn’t modify anything that close to the top of the script, so I’m really confused on what it’s doing.
    Does anyone have any ideas on why this might be happening?
    Again, if you want to see the code, there’s a link at the top to download it.
    THANKS!!!!!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • blipnet.net looks quite messed up in firefox. that apart, what charset are you using. It might be that the browser cannot recognize the charset from the definition.
    I always use UTF-8, so if you do the same then you can hard-code it into your index.php template, though it is not suggested.

    Thread Starter aristobrat

    (@aristobrat)

    Ewww, you weren’t joking about Firefox. <le sigh> Thanks for the heads up, I hadn’t gotten around to trying that yet! ??
    I guess I could hard-code the UTF-8 in.
    I’m just confused why removing the line fixes the problem.

    Well I’m afraid I can’t help you much as far as an explanation goes, but I did institute the archives.php file on my site https://www.smammers.com and it does work perfectly. It has helped me cut down on some of the “clutter” in my menu. Thanks for the work! ??

    Thread Starter aristobrat

    (@aristobrat)

    After 2fargon’s comment, I installed Firebired and what do you know — the “blank page” issue isn’t there. I only have it in IE 6.0.
    Oh well, for the time-being, I’m going to leave the CHARSET META commented out. I’ll try hard-coding it in later on and see how it goes. ??

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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