On Thu, 30 Dec 2004, Denzil Kruse wrote:
> I tried that, but it didn't matter much. What happens is I have a
> link. When I click on it, the browser hangs. If I switch to another
> application on my desktop whose window covers the browser, and then I
> switch back to the browser, the graphics of the browser is not
> redrawn. I use IE, and the windows logo isn't spinning and and green
> progress bar is going nowhere.
When I have a situation like this, I leave the web browser and start
debugging via other means.
Two options that come to mind are lynx and telnet. lynx is a text-mode
web browser that is available for Windows via Cygwin; you run it in a
DOS window. lynx has a very useful '-mime_header' command line option
that outputs the full, raw results of a request to the console. For
example, here's what a request to Google.com looks like:
$ lynx -mime_header http://google.com/
HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://www.google.com/
Set-Cookie:
PREF=ID=02bcd50c22028675:TM=1104438517:LM=1104438517:S=RDEtbY9uEaUVr5ze;
expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Content-Type: text/html
Server: GWS/2.1
Content-Length: 152
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 20:28:37 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>302 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>302 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://www.google.com/";>here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>
$
For testing your own site, you can do the same thing:
$ lynx -mime_header "http://mysite/cgi-bin/test.pl?a=1&b=2";
It's also possible to manually interact with the remote web server by
opening up a telnet sesstion to the web port. Here's an example; the
lines where I type things are prefixed with a '->' marker:
-> $ telnet www.google.com 80
Trying 64.233.187.99...
Connected to www.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
-> HEAD / HTTP/1.0
->
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie:
PREF=ID=38c23118a0763701:TM=1104438717:LM=1104438717:S=goAOAnKfb7EPl0ha;
expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Server: GWS/2.1
Content-Length: 0
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 20:31:57 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive
Connection closed by foreign host.
$
This can be useful, but it means you have to know how to "speak" HTTP to
a web server -- not that that's very hard, as there's only half a dozen
words or so in the whole HTTP "language", and the only ones you'd care
about in most cases are GET, POST, and HEAD.
But if you want to skip that, just use `lynx -mime_headers $URL`, or an
equivalent such as the command line tools that are installed [on Unix
systems] with Bundle::LWP from CPAN. In this way, you should be able to
see pretty clearly where things are breaking down, and you won't be
distracted by what the browser is doing in the background, because it
won't *be* in the background.
--
Chris Devers
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