Website links don't work when placed on external media

[Simon]

I work for a College and we have to send students website work of on CD to be
cross marked. The problem is when you place the websites on a CD or a USB,
too of the websites then have problems when viewed in Internet Explore 7 on
the USB or CD.

The problem is that the hyperlinks to PDF files and images stop working,
they are correct and you can still see that they are being seen from the bar
at the bottom of IE, but when you click nothing happens.

The websites both work while on an internal drive both on IE7 and Firefox,
but on the external they only work on Firefox and not IE7.

I have checked the Code and had others look over it and there is nothing
wrong with it, and I can’t find anything online about this problem.

The hyperlinks are all image based links, but I have tried to add a text
based hyperlink and it didn’t work either. The image links on the websites
that are not working are all links to .PDF files and images files like .Jpg
and .Gif. The image links on the site that link to other pages do work.

Simon

 

[DavidF]

To confirm, you can open the .htm files in both IE7 and FF, and the links to
your "external" files work as expected, when you open them on your local
drive, correct? But the links don't work when you try to open the same .htm
files when they are on a CD or a USB flash drive with IE, but are still ok
with FF?

The answer could be something as simple as the added security built into
IE7. It may be preventing the links from working. Have your tried it with a
machine that has IE6 on it? IE7 might be protecting you from yourself.

As I understand it, the best and safest way of opening any files is on a
local drive, and always copy files to the local drive before opening. There
are a lot of programs that choke in one way or the other when your try to
open and use a file on an external drive.

Another answer might be that Publisher produces two "sets" of code when you
convert to .htm files from the .pub file. One set is for IE and the other is
for other browsers. Its possible that this is why the links work in FF and
not IE. Publisher writes links in different ways for different browsers.

Go to http://devonviewcaravans.co.uk/ and mouseover the left side navbar,
and note that the status bar shows relative links such as
"index_files/Caravans.htm". If you also open that page in FF, and mouseover
the navbar links, the links are absolute:
"http://devonviewcaravans.co.uk/index_files/Caravans.htm ". Is it possible
that you need to change to absolute links to the external files?

When you open a .htm file that is local, if you look at the address field in
the browser, it points to the C drive and a temp folder where the browser
opens file. Where is the store file for your PDFs, and image files? When you
mouseover the link to an "external" file, what is it pointing toward? The C
drive or the USB or CD drive? Compare both the address path in the browser
and the mouseover path shown in the status bar, in both IE and FF, to the
external files and see if that leads to the answer.

DavidF