Baffled by CGI cross-browser issues... help sought :)

[Fred Pacquier]

Hi everyone,

The recent thread "Standalone CGI Server - Question for Group" taught me 
many things, and got me started on my first mini-project (alas :).

As a server I use Sandy Nortons's cute CGIHTTPServer trick, combined with 
Andrew Kuchling's mini-CGI-framework from Webtechniques 2/1998 
(http://www.newarchitectmag.com/archives/1998/02/kuchling/). Both make it 
easy to get the basics running on a local (Windows98SE + py 2.1) machine 
and experiment.

All went well at first (with the usual beginers' gotchas :), and I was 
quickly up to a half-dozen scripts working together. But now I've hit a 
wall I didn't think I'd find there : browser compatibility.

During development all testing was done with K-meleon (a lightweight 
Windows browser based on the Mozilla Gecko engine) and noticed no problems. 
Everything also works fine with Mozilla itself. But when I finally thought 
of testing my pages/scripts on more mainstream browsers there were nasty 
surprises :

* on Netscape 4.x things sort of work, except that each time I submit a 
form I get an error message like "A network error occurred while receiving 
data (connection reset by peer)". After dismissing the dialog the resulting 
page usually displays correctly (although sometimes truncated).

* under MSIE 5.5 it's worse, forms will display but submitting them never 
works, with a bewildering variety of failure modes : custom IE error pages 
(server not found or DNS error), blank pages, or more rarely terse messages 
from the http server (not executable, forbidden, etc.)

At this point I've spent more time tinkering and trying out wild guesses 
than it took me to actually write the initial scripts, and still no joy. It 
is dismaying to see something that simple and small break down that way...

If anyone has an idea of what and where to investigate I'd be grateful for 
that, as I'm nonplussed. The code is tiny and non-secret (although probably 
ugly as hell) so if anyone wants to take a look, that's easy too.

TIA,
fp

-- 
YAFAP : http://www.multimania.com/fredp/