[Spliff]

My girlfriend is working on an e-portfolio for her writing program. They're creating the portfolio in Dreamweaver MX 2004.

The e-portfolio has to be submitted on a CD-R. Her website, when accessed on the CD, works in Firefox and IE, but doesn't fully work in Safari. She has links to various articles in MS Word format. The expected behavior when someone clicks on the link is for the Word document to be downloaded to the user's computer. This works as expected in IE and Firefox. However, when the link is clicked in Safari, it either can't be displayed or Safari will open up the directory within the Dreamweaver folder on the CD where the Word document is contained.

The e-porfolio does work correctly with Safari when it is accessed via the web. However, the instructor has insisted that it must work correctly in Safari and Firefox when accessed from the CD.

Does anyone know how to correct this behavior so Safari users can view the site from the CD, as well?

[arcticmac]

and what's the problem with showing the file on the CD in the Finder? that sounds exactly like what I'd hope to have happen. Why should it download a COPY of the file to the desktop when the original is right there on a local disk anyhow?

[Spliff]

That's what I think. However, my girlfriend's instructor considers it an error, especially since none of the other Dreamweaver assignments handed in exhibit the same problem.

[Chuckit]

This might sound catty, but is there a requirement that the files be in Word format? HTML is the standard document format for the Web and is guaranteed to work with any Web browser on any computer.

[arcticmac]

well, I guess at this point, I'm not going to be able to help without copies of the HTML files and downloads, and even then... shrug... I'd probably actually need to have both a copy of the files that don't work and a copy of those that apparently do. I am surprised that any do, because I thought that was a default behavior of Safari, which is going to be awfully difficult to fix in the HTML - it should really be something controlled by the USER's PREFS, not by the web page.

[zro]

Try this URI in Safari, then Firefox or Camino or OmniWeb...

file:///users/

Safari does not handle the file:// protocol (or ftp:// which I'd bet the others will). It (rightly, I feel) passes file:// to the Finder which is the local file browser. Unless there are JavaScript tricks that can force a stream, there is nothing you can do about this for end users. It's just how Safari works.

[Spliff]

Thanks for the replies. I suspected that it was normal behavior (just different) for Safari. My gf is printing up the responses to show to her instructor.

[Thinine]

Yeah, that is the correct behavior.