I encounter a rather strange problem today. I have a set of HTML files stored locally on my machine. I can view each of the web pages in Fire Fox but not in IE. Every time I attempted to open the HTML in IE, IE would report that the file was missing even though I knew it was on the hard drive. I tried opening the file using the menu item File|Open from IE but it reported the same error message. Finally I decided to load the HTML file into Visual Studio.NET. To my surprise the file would not load and VS.NET would not report an error message. If I attempted to load the file a second time in VS.NET, the IDE would simply lock forcing me to kill the process.
After some detective work, I discovered the source of the problem. Seems that each HTML file I attempted to open had a comment line near the top of the file that looked like this: . Apparently this is special information that Microsoft products such as IE and VS.NET look for. I’m not sure how the information is used but I do know that neither tool reported meaningful messages regarding the commented line in the HTML file.
To resolve the problem, I removed the saved from url lines from each HTML file. IE and VS.NET are now happy as can be with regard to viewing these files.
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