.. title: conditionalhttp problems with IE 6 .. slug: conditionalproblems .. date: 2005-06-23 14:09:01 .. tags: pyblosxom, dev, python

Joseph pointed out a problem where IE 6 won't display a cached page when it gets a 304 from the conditionalhttp plugin. (The issue is at the bottom of the email.)

I did some poking around and discovered on Wednesday that this happens on his blog as well as on my blog with IE 6 on Windows XP. On Thursday, I was no longer able to reproduce the problem on my site, but Joseph's was still broken. I don't know off hand what changed with my site, though I did do an apt-get update Wednesday night.

Anyhow, the 304 response from my site (which seems to work fine now) is (note the server line is wrapped):

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:32:26 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) mod_python/2.7.10 Python/2.3.4  \
        PHP/4.3.10-15 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7d DAV/1.0.3
ETag: "1119536230.43"
Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:17:10 GMT
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

And from Joseph's site (which is still not working):

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:37:15 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat)
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
ETag: "1118428239.0"
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent

=bunch of funky non-printable characters here=

Looking at responses from other requests to Joseph's server leads me to believe that pages are gzipped. I'm not sure if that's part of the issue or not.

My site: http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/blog/

Joseph's site: http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/

I'm running PyBlosxom 1.2.1 with the contributed plugins pack 1.2.2 with conditionalhttp. I think Joseph is as well. I have no idea if this is affecting anyone else--no one else has complained on the mailing lists or anywhere else that I've checked.

Anyone have any ideas as to what might be happening?