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Blank page in IE6

Answer 1

A:

Not sure if this exactly matches your experience. It depends on which specific version of IE (including service packs) is being used.

A known rendering issue with IE6 SP2 & IE7 (both use the same rendering engine) is the existence of orphaned tags in your HTML. This may be an orphaned div or script tag.

<script language="javascript">    // no closing tag
alert('hello world');
<body>
hello world
</body>

The above renders just fine in IE6 SP1 and Firefox, but you will only see a blank page in IE6 SP2 & IE7.

There are certain other tags that must have a separate closing tag. Check that any <div> and <script> tags have an ending </script> or <div> tag, not just a closing slash at the end of the opening tag. Another one is <textarea>. You have to have both tags.

You can test if this is occurring with your site if you can View Source of your blank page and get the source html even though your page is blank.

DOK 2008-11-06 12:50:16

Thank you that is very interesting and I will test it. View Source is not even opening Notepad in this case. I think I should use a packet sniffer to check what data is actually being transferred.

Liam 2008-11-06 12:56:31

Good idea. It's kinda hard to try to diagnose a problem with a completely blank page isn't it? This gave me fits when IE6 SP2 came out and I had pages with empty, named div's that were self-closing. Let us know what you find out.

DOK 2008-11-06 13:02:02

Answer 2

+3 A:

This is a content-type problem from IE. It doens know how to handle application/xhtml+xml.

Although you write xhtml+xml, IE only knows text+html. It will be the future before all agents know xhtml+xml

change your meta tag with content type to content="text/html;

Dr. Hfuhruhurr 2008-11-06 12:52:38

If I change that to text/html, can I still use XHTML?

Liam 2008-11-06 13:02:17

You can definitely use XHTML in IE, though as I noted, there are a few quirks. I've been coding XHTML exclusively for years in .Net.

DOK 2008-11-06 13:09:47

yes you can, but it will be sent as html. At least you can validate to make sure you have valid xhtml.<br>See also: http://h3h.net/2005/12/xhtml-harmful-to-feelings/

Dr. Hfuhruhurr 2008-11-07 08:25:33

another note: xhtml=html, but with the structure of xml

Dr. Hfuhruhurr 2009-01-09 13:40:56

Answer 3

+1 A:

Sounds like bug #153 "Self Closing Script Tag" bug in IE, which is well known to cause blank pages.

Due to IE's bug, you can NEVER code the following and expect it to work in IE.

<script src="...." />

(if the tag is self closing, you are in for a world of pain)

Instead, always code as;

<script src="...."></script>

scunliffe 2008-11-06 13:30:08

Answer 4

A:

You should serve pages with the Content-Type header as text/html to IE users. You don't need to change the meta tag, just leave it as application/xhtml+xml (IE will ignore it).

Mauricio 2008-11-07 22:57:05

Answer 5

+1 A:

I had a similar problem that was language specific - only the page with multibyte characters didn't show in IE6 and IE7. Turns out in these two browsers, the order of the Content-Type meta tag and the title tag is a big deal. So putting the tag (which contained Japanese characters) after the meta tag fixed the problem.

Greg Lane 2009-10-07 10:10:40

Yes, any tags about content-type and charsets use only characters from the basic ASCII set, as these have the same byte values in many different encodings. If a title tag appears before the content-type, a browser may fail to read the content-type correctly.

Liam 2009-10-08 09:36:31

Answer 6

A:

I got this bug due to a typing error.

I wrote the meta tag :

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-15" />

Thanks to you i corrected it to :

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

and i haven't the problem now.

Baha14 2009-11-13 13:59:55

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Blank page in IE6

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