"Document Contains No Data"

[Martin Sevigny]

Hello everyone,

>On Sat, 7 Dec 1996, Adele Krusz wrote:
>
>> 	I've been having a lot of problems, lately, with
>> accessing some sites.  I keep getting the message "Document
>> Contains No Data."  I know the URL's are valid, because I can get
>> them on other peoples' machines. 
> 
>I've also been seeing this message a lot lately (it seems like it's more
>common since I upgraded from Netscape 2.0 to 3.0, but I wouldn't swear to
>it).  One thing that sometimes works is to add a trailing slash to the URL
>I'm trying to reach.  

I'm having a lot of problems with that too, and here are some tips and
possible explanations.

First, for me it only happens with Netscape (2.0 or 3.01) on Windows 3.11,
not on Windows 95 or Macintosh or other browsers. And every time it
happened and I had the chance to try with another browser (Lynx, Internet
Explorer) or platform, I don't have any other problem. So it really seems
to be a Netscape on Windows 3.11 problem...

The solution above is a good one. When you fetch a URL that ends with a
directory (folder) name, like http://tornade.ere.umontreal.ca/~sevignm,
Netscape asks the server fot the resource, but the server returns an
indirectin (code 302), to the proper URL, which contains a slash, like
http://tornade.ere.umontreal.ca/~sevignm/. By the way, it's a good idea to
always advertise these kinds of URLs with a trailing slash, since it saves
a connection!

The problem is this one: some servers return not only the indirection code
and the new URL, but also a short message which is an HTML document.
Netscape doesn't have any problem with these answers (and of course, it
doesn't show the document, it only gets the new URL with the slash). But
when the servers don't return a short document (and they don't _have_ to),
Netscape gives us a "Document contains no data" error, which is very
annooying, since it ignores completely the redirection.

So appending a slash will sure help, but unfortunately when you click on an
image map, you can't! And if you get a "document contains no data" and the
web page has no alternative, you can't get where you want (with Netscape).

I've never seen this "feature" reported as a bug, and may be there are
other explanations. But it is very annoying... My explanations come from
the study of  about 20 links ending with a directory name, by looking at
the details of the HTTP sessions with... a good old telnet client!

Hope this helps,

Martin Sévigny
Research assistant
EBSI, Université de Montréal
http://tornade.ere.umontreal.ca/~sevignm/
sevignm at ere.umontreal.ca