strange CSS behavior

Hi folks,

I have a strange forum behavior to report:

Let’s say I successfully logged in to the forums and have the list of SLES sub-forums open (https://forums.suse.com/forumdisplay.php?8-SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server), to check for new messages. If one of the forum icons turns green, there’s something new and I open the individual forum in a new browser tab.

From time to time, I want to update the list to check if everything is read (after going through all sub-forums) and/or if something new turned up. So I select my browser tab with the sub-forum list and press “F5” in my up-to-date Firefox to refresh the page. But instead of the usual display, I see all HTML ULs without special formatting, giving the page a rather weird look (and hinting at a missing CSS file). Another F5 will bring back the proper look&feel, the next F5 brings back the bogus version and so on. “f5” is synonym to pressing the “reload page” symbol to the left of the browser’s URL entry field.

But when I klick on the URL in the entry field and simply press “enter”, the page reloads fine, every time.

I had a look at the site network requests using Firebug and noticed that during proper loads, three calls to https://forums.suse.com/css.php (with different parameters) were made that did not occur on the “bad” reloads.

Can anybody confirm this - and as I’m a curious guy, can anyone point me at the root cause? I was under the impression that “reload” and “klick the current url and hit enter” would basically do the same thing, but obviously I’m proven wrong. Oh, and maybe someone at Novell/SuSE could fix this, too? :wink:

Regards,
Jens

… and a minor thing I forgot to tell: It seems that in that (not always loaded) CSS, a non-existing file is referenced (https://forums.suse.com/images/misc/down9x9.gif), Firebug reports a 404 for that URL when loading the page otherwise correctly.

Thanks Jens. I’ll have a look at that when I get a minute and see what
I can find. I appreciate the feedback.


Kim - 11/12/2012 12:04:15 PM

Jens,

That was a strange one. It was an issue with gzip compression on the
web pages and how SSL acted upon it. It would send corrupted CSS
sometimes. We had to make a couple of Apache setting changes but in my
testing it’s fixed now. Let me know if you see it again.

As for the missing graphic, it’s supposed to be missing. I’ll fix the
css file that calls it.

Thanks again for the feedback.


Kim - 11/13/2012 10:25:28 AM

Hi Kim,

just to confirm: it works for me, too.

[QUOTE=kgroneman;10127]Jens,

That was a strange one.[…][/QUOTE]

Had it been an easy one, you’d have had it fixed before I even had a chance to notice it in the first place :wink:

Thank you for the quick reaction to my report, great service!

Regards,
Jens