Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to More of the same, plus

re: More of the same, plus

"More of the same, plus" kinda describes my response, too.

This has to be something peculiar to your browser, computer, or Internet service--nobody else has reported the problem, and the server sends the same pages to everybody.

The text you're seeing is the "header", a preamble to the Web page HTML with technical information about the server and about the information that follows (the page). It's a fundamental part of the technology that a browser never displays the header. There's supposed to be a blank line separating the header and the start of the page, which begins with an <HTML> tag. Only the stuff starting at <HTML> should be displayed.

What could cause the browser to display the header? Defective browser, maybe; the voodoo is to try and reinstall IE. Shot in the dark.

Another, and perhaps more plausible, explanation is that the transmission is getting garbled somewhere between the server and you. That's why I asked about an accelerator, because they insert themselves in the middle and play compression games with the transmission. In a similar vein, many of the big ISPs nowadays set up "caching servers" that store frequently-requested Web pages locally, so that you get them quicker when you request them (and the ISP's bandwidth usage is reduced--self interest, not customer service). This seems to be particularly true of cable modem systems...like RoadRunner. The general theory is that some third-party between you and the server is doing something to the pages before you see them.

To test this theory, next time you see the header, use View Source (use the right-click mouse menu) to display the raw data. One possibility, if somebody's "adjusting" the data before it gets there, is that you might see the header duplicated; the browser would try and display everything after the first header. Copy everything up to the starting <HTML> tag and paste it into a post for me.

All I got is theories at the moment, man. This is going to take more work to figure out.

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