FIX: Fragment Identifiers Ignored for Links on UTF-8 pages

ID: Q182501

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Internet Explorer (Programming) versions 4.0, 4.01

SYMPTOMS

Hyperlinks that use fragment identifiers ("#fragment") on the URL to identify a specific location in the target resource will fail in Internet Explorer 4.0, 4.01 (IE 4.0x) for UTF-8 pages, sometimes with the following error message:

Internet explorer cannot open the Internet site <garbage>.
Make sure the address is correct and try again."

CAUSE

IE 4.0x parses URLs with embedded "#" symbols incorrectly for the UTF-8 code page.

RESOLUTION

The only available workaround at this time is to use an alternative character set (charset).

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a bug in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. This bug was corrected in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.

MORE INFORMATION

The following HTML demonstrates the problem:


<HTML>
<HEAD>
  <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
  <TITLE>Repro of UTF-8 Fragment Failure Bug</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
  <A HREF="#subloc1">Jump down</A>
  <!-- ... bunch of BR's ... -->
  <A NAME=subloc1>Many lines down</A>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Activating the hyperlink in this document generates the symptoms described in this article--nothing happens or an error message box is shown. With the correct behavior, Internet Explorer should scroll the document down to the sub-location within the document.

In IE 4.0x, a page can be specified as UTF-8 in multiple ways such as the following:

With a META tag in the HTML document (as demonstrated above)

Via HTTP Content-Type header added by CGI EXE or ISAPI DLL

By specifying a default charset in the IE Fonts Dialog

All methods result in the bug described in this article.

REFERENCES

HTML 4.0 RFC 1866, subsection 7.4:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.1.1

Additional query words: hash bookmark #


Keywords          : kberrmsg kbIE500fix 
Version           : 
Platform          : 
Issue type        : kbbug

Last Reviewed: July 1, 1999