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Site Displays Text Only When Using FireFox

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http://www.atchistory.org/

Reference the above site I own. Other browsers display my site correctly but FireFox displays all pages in nothing but text. Other users report the exact same problem.

Can you help identify why this is the case? This is a very large site.

Thank you. Mick

http://www.atchistory.org/ Reference the above site I own. Other browsers display my site correctly but FireFox displays all pages in nothing but text. Other users report the exact same problem. Can you help identify why this is the case? This is a very large site. Thank you. Mick

All Replies (7)

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I get the same thing.

I did a web search, and found this; atchistory.wordpress.com

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That site is for another country and not related to mine. Thanks.

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If you look at the page source code then you will see that this is not valid HTML code. The page is created with Microsoft Front Page and this software usually doesn't create W3C compatible code.

You need to use a real HTML editor to create pages that open in all browsers.

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Thanks. I suspected this might be the problem but it works in all other browsers and displays correctly in DreamWeaver. Too many errors to fix with my limited knowledge.

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Hi Mick, the source says it was created using Frontpage 2007. If you still have that program, I think there must be a way to save or export the out of Frontpage using normal HTML tags, without all the "msnavigation."

Anyway, the immediate reason for the problem is something I call "deep nesting" where the content is buried within so many tags within tags that Firefox just gives up on trying to render the content and either dumps it out onto the page as text or doesn't show anything at all. I'm attaching a screenshot showing the nesting in the Inspector tool.

If I view source (Ctrl+u) and save the page locally, and then delete all the msnavigation lines out of the <head> section of the page, the page will display in Firefox. Hopefully that will work on other pages on the site as well if they suffer from the same problem. Cleaning up the body would be nice, too... but hopefully you can find an automated tool for that.

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Thank you very much for the information and suggestions. I'll try to do all that but there are several thousand pages. Wish I could find an automated too. Thank you.

Mick

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When I look at an older version of the home page in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, there are some of those msnavigation tags in there, but only a handful. I have no idea how it metastasized into what you have now.

Nov. 3, 2016 home page

One thing that may be relevant is that they are supposed to be comments, not actual tags:

<!--msnavigation-->

On older pages that haven't been updated for a while, that's how they appear in the page source. For example:

Life Stores updated 9/10/12

Well... good luck.