Basic .html webpages and encoding types when saving; does it make any difference?

[Clint1]

Which "plugin" are you referring to?

I forgot that info was a different thread. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6647 . But I don't remember the thread now or I'd paste the info about it here or give a link to it. He may have to tell us how to use it to maybe diagnose the refresh problem.

[deepsand]

I know, see my first post on this thread. ".....(I found out that prompt can be bypassed by changing a setting in the current non-legacy File Manager). But the options are still there if you want to change encoding."

You can still see the drop-down menu of the encodings, and the encoding it "chose", that's how I found out about the odd encodings.

So you did. My not remembering that owes to the fact that when you started the thread I'd not been able to see what you were seeing, and not therefore able to put all that you then said in context for better later recall, so that I simply had no memory of your mention of the regular File Manager.

Hopefully this means that I'm fired, as I could certainly use the rest.

[Daniel L.]

(Edited out. I see one of my helpers here [Danny] was logged in using FF.).

[Clint1]

Well I'm having to use FF now because this page is in the refresh loop for me again in IE. But it didn't do it in FF. I guess I'd have to use FF all the time here and just hope I may catch it with HTTPFox running. (Updated: now the page is working IE).

So you did. My not remembering that owes to the fact that when you started the thread I'd not been able to see what you were seeing, and not therefore able to put all that you then said in context for better later recall, so that I simply had no memory of your mention of the regular File Manager.

I was just letting you know that I was aware that could be done.

Hopefully this means that I'm fired, as I could certainly use the rest.

Fired from......?

"Rest"? What is "rest"?? I hear of that, but I forget what it was. I'll have to look that up.....................................Ok, ah yes, I remember that now.

HA!! "A bodily state characterized by minimal functional and metabolic activities". "Minimal functional activities", I guess that means I must be "resting" all the time. I'm minimally functional. ROTFLMAO.

[deepsand]

At the moment, I've got this page open in both FF 3.5 & IE 6, with no odd behavior.

Who is Daniel L.?

[Clint1]

That's been edited now. Sort of an "employee" for me from time to time. Obviously he doesn't post here much (and obviously prefers FF).

It happened to me again on IE6. I'm beginning to find that sometimes I can click "Stop" on the toolbar at a specific time, then click the "Refresh" button and sometimes it will reload then stop and go back to normal. They key is clicking the Stop button at the right time.

[deepsand]

Still okay here on both browsers.

And, as I've an alarm going off in 5 & 1/2 hrs., and a 1/2 hr.+ drive to home, I'm about ready to call it a wrap for tonight.

Enjoy.

[wige]

Is this happening in IE6 specifically? Or does it occur in Firefox from time to time as well, just more rarely? If it is limited to IE6 I have some thoughts on a possible cause, but if it affects other browsers it would have to be something different.

There are only a few ways to cause a page to redirect, for all browsers other than IE6, these are limited to scripts, redirect headers, and meta redirects. If it happens in Firefox, I would start by using the web developer toolbar addon and disable Meta Redirects. You could also disable Javascript. That would at least rule out the redirection being cause by those sources. The header addon should show in the response codes if the page request is getting a looping 301 redirection, however Firefox at least is supposed to detect infinite redirects and display an error message (unless you are bouncing between two pages over and over)

[Clint1]

What I said above in post #17 about finding how to do this, not true. Today, the files have all reverted back to their previous mysterious encodings!

I just got through trying to paste the code of one page into Notepad, in the event Metapad may have some kind of "encoding" we don't know about, and that didn't change
anything--same strange behavior after copy/pasting it from Notepad. (Oddly enough, plain Jane basic Notepad has the option of encoding saving if you "Save as.....". It defaults to ANSI, and the only other options there are "Unicode", "Unicode big endian", and "UTF-8").

This was never an issue in the older cPanel x2 theme, because it was simply not an option. When files where opened, there was no option for decoding the encoding as there is in the File Manager of x3. And, this is not solely a Legacy File Manager bug, because it's still happening on the new NON-Legacy File Manager.
So the issue is not specific to anything "Legacy".

I started to think that the true operational behavior of this function was that the drop-down encoding menu may only be for the way the files are OPENED, and it may have nothing to do with the way the files are SAVED. But no, that's not it, look at what it says below the drop-down menu options:

"We have attempted to auto-detect the encoding of this file. However, this is not a foolproof process since some files will display properly with multiple different encodings. You should select the encoding that this file was originally created with. It is very important that you select the proper encoding; saving your file with the wrong encoding may result in the corruption of your text."

Note the blue part. So according to that, you ARE supposed to be able to save the files with (different?) encoding. Further:

"If you are only using a Western European language like English, Spanish or French without any special characters you can safely assume "ISO-8859-1" will work just fine. If you are using a non-western language or you have special characters that are not HTML encoded in your file, you should enter "utf-8". If your file appears with text like this: or [images were here] you may have selected the incorrect encoding. If this happens, you should immediately abort the edit and select the correct encoding. You should not save the file; this will likely corrupt the text permanently".

Sounds serious! Well, the problem is you can OPEN the files in any encoding you want, but, cannot SAVE it in any encoding you want. Sounds like that's a bad idea to make the x3 theme like that! Why not just keep like it was in x2 when this was never any problem??? (Another example of newer versions being buggy). cPanel needs to be asked that, especially since the encoding cannot be changed. (I would ask cPanel about this myself, but a few years back I tried to contact them about something else and they wouldn't give me the time of day. They said my host would have to contact them! I fail to understand that. I contacted my new hosts, HostGator [so far so good] about this and they've never had anyone ask them this before, so they've never noticed it. Maybe they will ask cPanel).

I know us-ascii and ISO-8859-1 are ok. But my problem, issue, with all of this is what does odd encodings like "big5" or "ansi_x3.110-1983" do to a search engine bot's ability to properly parse the page? According to Wige, nothing, but it might with the "big5" encoding. If that answer is an undeniable, definite "not a thing", then all this is a moot point. But at the very least I'm most curious as to what the problem is with cPanel, why is it doing this.

I just found out one thing, pages shown as "big5", today at least, cannot be opened then saved as ISO-8859-1. But they can be opened and then saved as US-ASCII. I don't get it. If that still holds tomorrow, then I guess that should at least fix or help with the potential 'big5' encoding problem.

[Clint1]

Is this happening in IE6 specifically? Or does it occur in Firefox from time to time as well, just more rarely? If it is limited to IE6 I have some thoughts on a possible cause, but if it affects other browsers it would have to be something different.

I don't know if that's addressed to me, or "quicksand". If him, I don't know, but like I said yesterday I think he said it had it happen to him on FF, and in checking over this thread that appeared to have happened on another thread. I can't find the thread.