Today’s Schroedinbug

Weird-ass networking problem of the day. Myself and _Quinn have been requesting the same pages on multiple machines on each end, in multiple browsers, and I have come up with the following busted scenario.

Some of http headers, max transfer unit, cookies, html formatting on this page, combined with the chunk of network cloud we’re going through, cause various Mozilla or Firefox browsers to display the php-generated html page in Quirks mode.

Saving the page locally and redisplaying it causes all browsers everywhere to render it in Standards Complient mode. Saving the html on either server, and serving it up with standard headers causes all browsers everywhere to display in Standards Complient mode, on both sides of the cloud. However, the page it was pulled from still renders in Quirks mode when requested from the opposite side of the cloud from where it’s being hosted.

I created a transparent tunnel via some ssh+iptables tomfoolery, and the remotely hosted pages load perfectly fine on my end, through the tunnel, rendered by both Mozilla1.6 and Firefox1.0, on both Linux and Windows desktops, in Standards Complient mode.

Thus, if I bypass the scary network cloud, everything works. But if either I or _Quinn route packets through it, when executing this php code, the resultant html causes Mozilla to render in Quirks mode.

This makes no sense. At all.

I think the network between us should never have worked in the first place. I declare the internet cloud to be a latent schroedinbug.

I don’t really think this is an MTU problem, but I’m out of other ideas. Anyone have a guess?