Incomplete or blank pages

It has occasionally happened that somebody received an incomplete or blank page, and this error was persistent, i.e. when calling up the same page once more, it again appeared incomplete or blank.

First of all, please make sure that the content of the page is really missing and not just pushed down below the side bar—a display error we have occasionally seen in the past on Internet Explorer version 6 or earlier, but which had been fixed, or so we believe. Please go back to the problem page, scroll down towards the bottom of the page, and check whether the missing content is there underneath the side bar. If it is, then the rest of this message does not apply. Instead please write a brief message to the webmaster (me) and tell me which page exhibited the problem and which browser and version of browser you used. You can find the browser version through its command Help, About, or Help, Info, or similar.

All genuinely incomplete pages were not served incomplete by our server. The problem was that the end of the page got lost somewhere on its way to your screen.

What can you do? Try the following different remedies and check which one solved your problem.

1. Click on the reload or refresh button on your browser. This is typically a button two arrows circling each other or one arrow formed like a circle.
2. Append a # character to the URL, i.e. click into the address field at the top of your browser, click again to the right of the address (or press the End key), then type # to append that character to the existing address and press return.
3. Delete the temporary Internet file cache in your browser.
   • In Firefox the command to delete the cache is Tools, Delete private data.
   • In the dialog box remove all the check marks except the one labelled Cache.
   • If you have only that single check mark left, click on OK.
   • Then try to reload the page.
   • In Internet Explorer the procedure is similar, via Tools, Internet options, Delete ..., Temporary Internet files. (No need to delete the other stuff, like cookies. They don't cause this problem.)

The technical background is that the browser receives an incomplete page once, due to a poor connection, and stores it in its cache. The next time you call up that page, the browser doesn't reload it from the server, but instead shows you the same incomplete cached page.

There is an even worse case, namely that your Internet access service provider runs something called a transparent proxy server. This is a near-fraudulent method to skimp on external, particularly international data traffic costs. In that case you can't do anything but use a different provider or wait until one day the page is dropped from their cache, which usually happens after a couple of days, in the very worst case, weeks. I haven't seen that in Europe for a long time, but it still happens in Africa.

Technically a transparent proxy server caches whole web pages in its own storage and serves them from there when they are called up again by any user. The problem is that the page may be incomplete, when there was an Internet connection problem when it was first loaded, and then all users of that Internet access service provider would always get that incomplete page, until the proxy server reloads it, typically after a couple of days.

These proxy servers are called transparent, because they are transparent to the end user. In other words, the end user does not notice and cannot find out that the page is not loaded from the source server, but instead from the proxy server's cache.

Hans

p.s. I don't like the design of the web in this respect. It is fundamentally unreliable and often doesn't tell you that something's amiss. Missing pictures are indicated and can be reloaded manually, but incomplete pages are not always noticeable by the user. But we can't help it, we have to take it as it is. The best way to avoid such problems is to have a fast, reliable Internet connection, but I know that this is sometimes a little difficult to come by in Africa.