Image Display Problem

[mcp6453]

Not my site, but I am curious. The main image on the home page at
http://www.patents.com does not display. There is an explanation on the
page: "Can't see the image any more? If you are using Internet Explorer,
you probably installed a security patch from Microsoft in about February
2004. That patch breaks Internet Explorer so that it is unable to view
certain types of URLs. Try a browser other than IE instead. (We are
working to find a way to reconfigure the web page to get around the IE
flaw.)"

Anybody know what the problem is or what the security update that causes
the problem is? I looked at the source, but I couldn't tell.

 

[David Dorward]

Not my site, but I am curious. The main image on the home page at
http://www.patents.com does not display. There is an explanation on the
page: "Can't see the image any more? If you are using Internet Explorer,
you probably installed a security patch from Microsoft

Internet Explorer no longer supports http://username:password@host/path
style URIs.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Internet Explorer no longer supports http://username:password@host/path
style URIs.

.... which were never part of any URI specification, so when
www.patents.com uses words like "breaks" and "flaw", they indicate lack
of understanding what they had been doing, and are doing. It does not
surprise me that they also rely on JavaScript in displaying the image, or
that they spend quite some text to explain something completely
irrelevant. If I want to know about intellectual property law, I take it
as insult to my intellect to waste my time babbling about some foolish
webcam image that I cannot see.

They even have a "Best Viewed with Any Browser" icon.

And they try to make the page auto-refreshing every 5 minutes (with a
comment saying 30 seconds, but we already knew that comments in HTML are
used just to confuse people who read HTML source) - on a page that says
"This page last revised August 29, 2002." (which might or might not be
true; anyway it was last _changed_ three months ago).

Sometimes I wish browsers had a plonking feature. That is, upon
encountering something majestetically stupid, I could tell my browser to
stop showing any pages from that site, or at least flag links pointing to
it with bogosity warnings.