IE Two Minutes Hate
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Stupidass IE XP SP2 Information Bar Warning
It’s official, yet again – IE is the llama whose ass was whipped. When you try to view a locally saved webpage that contains Javascript using IE under Windows XP SP2, you get the above cryptic yet alarming message. Microsoft’s documentation on using the hackish Mark of the Web (MOTW) to alter the security zone under which the webpage is loaded makes it seem like this is an easy problem to resolve.
So easy they forgot to mention that more is required than simply adding the MOTW, as I discovered when trying unsuccessfully to include it into MoSudoku. The line breaks in the html must be Windows formatted CRLF; using Unix formatted LF line breaks causes IE to ignore the MOTW!
How much more freakin’ BRAINDAMAGED could IE possibly be?
I debugged the problem using Notepad++ under Windows. To show the line breaks in a file, make sure “View > Show End Of Line” is checked. The line break format can easily be changed by selecting “Format > Convert to Windows Format”. Sometimes unexpected newline conversions can occur when you upload files using FTP clients, as I unfortunately found out is the case with Filezilla. What irks me the most is that Filezilla does this without giving any indication that it is doing so, and does not allow one to configure its behavior otherwise. This is really bad design. In my mind the act of uploading a file is a form of copying. If a program is going to make an inexact copy, I want to be informed about it. Filezilla is silent about its egregious shenanigans.