The Use of Special Characters in Article Titles may Result in error When Using IE 6

Knowledgebase 8.1 and newer and end users using IE 6

Replication Steps
Customer Browser:  IE6
Create an imported article made from a pdf or create an imported article made from an XLS
Search for or browse to the article in a Portal
Open Article

This will result in a generic error message:


or this when trying to hit an excel spreadsheet article:

The generic message can be transformed by following this article to expose the specific detailed message.
The detailed message is:

When a colon is used in the URL of document and the document is accessed by IE6, it triggers a condition that modern webservers and applications interpret as malicious. It is this combination that would cause the behavior to present.

In the investigation it was determined that when using IE6 if the title of the article contains some specials characters it will result in this behavior. This behavior will not manifest when using Internet Explorer 7, 8, Firefox or Chrome. There are two factors which trigger the problem:

Primary:  The use of the colon (:) in the title of an article.  In the example the client  renamed the title of documents to contain a colon (:) after uploading the pdfs and xls.

Secondary: The problem on presents itself only on IE6.  Internet Explorer 6 is a 10 year old technology which does not have the same security capabilities as newer browsers.

The issue has a work around.  The problem can happen on any PS4 when using IE6.  It only occurs when using IE6 which is no longer a supported browser.  

Best practices

1. Do not use a colon (or other special characters such as ; / & %) in the title of an Article.  Using a dash (-) is however perfectly acceptable and should prove a visually adequate alternative.

2. IE6 remains an unsupported browser due to its age and vulnerabilities. Clients should move towards using modern supported browsers.