Frequently Asked Questions

Q:

How do I debug a URL that is not working in OmniWeb 2.0

A:

If a URL isn't handling correctly in OmniWeb 2.0, check the URL by hand.

If the URL is:

http://www.foo.com/path/file.ext

Type this in a Terminal window to download the file yourself:

telnet www.foo.com http
GET /path/file.ext HTTP/1.0

Case is important. The boldface words are the only ones that ever change. If there is a number after the hostname in the URL (like http://www.foo.com:80/), replace the "http" on the first line with the number.

This will fetch the file so you can look at the original source. It will also fetch the headers at the start of the file, which OmniWeb 2 normally can't display. These headers most often give clues as to why OmniWeb isn't handling the file correctly.

Here are some sample headers:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 1996 21:05:10 GMT
Server: Apache/0.8.14
Content-type: application/postscript
Content-encoding: x-gzip
Content-length: 33247
Last-modified: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 01:05:49 GMT

Common errors that servers put in these header include:

• Having whitespace at the beginning of any of the lines. A couple of servers have done this, and since OmniWeb obeys RFC822, we don't like this.
• Advertising the wrong Content-type:. If it's an HTML file, the Content-type: should be text/html. If it's text/plain or text/x-sgml, it's wrong on the server side.

SEE ALSO: URL misinterpreted

Valid for 2.0

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