HTML Slasher - Backslash Demo

Discontinued Jan 2004

Demonstration of "broken images"
The following images demonstrate the problem that backslashes in HTML image paths cause your Web page visitors with browsers other than Internet Explorer. If you are viewing this in Netscape, for instance, the contents of Image 2, below, would be a mystery without this explanation.

Image 1

The intended image
(src="../images/problem.gif)
looks fine in all browsers.

Image 2

When referenced with backslash
(src="..\images\problem.gif)
it can not seen in Netscape.

Image 3

Shows our Internet Explorer
visitors what Netscape users
see instead of Image 2.

Background and embeded sounds, videos and other multimedia face the same problem.

Demonstration of "broken links"
The following links demonstrate the problem that backslashes in hyperlink URLs cause your Web page visitors with browsers other than Internet Explorer. If you are viewing this in Netscape, for instance, you would never see the page referenced by Link 2 had we not exposed it in another link.

Link 1, (href="../linkdemo.html") works for any browser.

Link 2, (href="..\linkdemo.html") cannot be accessed by Netscape because of the backslash.

Link 3, (href="../fake.html") is just a fake page to show our Internet Explorer visitors what Netscape users see when they click Link 2, above.

Other problems
Another potential for disaster exists with frame pages. We can not duplicate this here, but we are familiar with one site on an NT server which had a page that loaded frames using backslashes, similar to this partial example:
    <frameset rows="134,*">
    <frame src="update\menu.html" name="top">
    <frame src="update\welcome.html" name="main">
    </frameset>
From this site the frame content pages (named menu.html and welcome.html in this example) would actually load despite the backslashes (this apparently due to the NT server or its IIS setup). These content pages contained local graphics and links which were error free, like so:
    <img height=89 width=95 src="images/logo.gif">
    <a href="music/music.html" target=main>Music Page</a>
The problem was that these links and images were broken when tested with Netscape and another non-IE browser, even though their URLs properly used slashes. Why? The browsers expanded the filenames in the URLs to complete paths:
    /update\images/logo.gif
    /update\music/music.html
The resulting mixture of slashes and backslashes were obviously too much for anything other than Internet Explorer to deal with.