Tip for when Webhelp won't display in IE

[dmaiorana]

My company's application runs on a weblogic server. When we linked our webhelp into the help menu in our application, we got a problem that I saw some others in the forum have experienced: When accessing the app via IE (6 or 7), the help's frame/skin opens, but that's it, no content. None of the fixes suggested by support or that I found in this forum solved the problem. I did find info on the Adobe forum or knowledgebase about using lowercase in filenames when creating webhelp that will run off unix servers.

For the record, the help worked normally through Firefox.

What finally solved the problem was this: I went through the project and changed all filenames -- including images and toc etc -- everything I had created, to lowercase with no spaces. As webhelp projects contain automatically generated files that use upper case, I think it was eliminating the spaces that solved the problem. Maybe this is a best practice for unix, unbenownst to me. Posting here in the hope that it will assist anyone else who experiences the same issue.

[RamonS]

So before you removed the spaces it worked fine in Firefox, just not in IE? That indicates that the Unix server is working alright, but that the client is buggy, in this case IE 6 and IE7. Now, why doesn't surprise me that in any form or fashion? Another nice example why nobody should use IE.

[dmaiorana]

I suspected you would say that!

[KevinDAmery]

Another nice example why nobody should use IE.

And nobody should smoke, eat at McDonalds, or talk on a cell phone while driving either. I'm not holding my breath waiting for everyone to smarten up, though

[RamonS]

Then I wonder how many times issues like that need to become a problem. It is clearly a client issue (browser). What we need is mandatory warranties for software products. Places like Microsoft would have a tough time.

[MarinaMichaels]

Spaces in file names are always problematic on the Windows platform anyway. It is always a good practice to avoid them. They can cause a lot of problems that are hard to troubleshoot.