internet explorer 11 - IE html anchor tags don't work when referencing local files that were made on other computers

Question

I'm working on a large project, which uses IE (IE11) to display local htm pages. (Yes, IE is required. I can't use a different browser). We aren't using a web server; everything is pulled from the local drive. No http requests are made during this.

We're planning to send parts of it out to remote locations to use on those sites. Atm I'm using a self-extracting rar, so that the htm, js, css, and media files can all be put in the proper locations. After deployment, the file structure on the remote location should mirror that of the Dev system. Everything works fine on the Dev system. However, at the remote sites some of the anchor links stop working. After some testing, it appears that if the file I'm trying to link to originated from a different computer, the link does nothing. But if I were to make a new file, copy everything from the old file to the new file, and replace the old one with the new one, the link works. The files are identical in content, but only the one that originated from the remote site works.

<a href="foo.htm">Link</a>

The above would work if foo.htm was created on that computer, but not if it was created on a different computer (such as the Dev computer). This issue appears to occur with .htm/html files, as well as .css and .js files. It might also occur for media files, but I didn't check.

I imagine there is some kind of security setting or something that needs to be changed, but I can't figure out what. We plan to distribute to a lot of sites, so I can't manually fix the problem for every site.

Any idea why this is happening?

Edit: No errors pop up in the console when I click on the links. I didn't check out the network tab, since everything is local, but that might be a thing to try tomorrow. Also, I didn't know about file blocking. I'll check that too. If that were to be the case, how can I unblock the files automatically? This may be deployed to people who don't have a strong grasp of computers.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65921157/ie-html-anchor-tags-dont-work-when-referencing-local-files-that-were-made-on-ot

Answer 1

From the description of the issue, it looks like when you send the zip file to another machine then on that machine file gets blocked.

Below are some ways to unblock the file or to prevent the blocking. You can choose the suitable way as per your requirement.

1. The easiest way to unblock the file is to, right-click the zip file then click on properties and click on the Unblock Checkbox and click the OK button. Then after try to unzip the file. It will unblock all files together.

2. You can also try to unblock the zip file by using the PowerShell command below.

   dir "folderpath" -Recurse | Unblock-File

Note: Make sure to run the script as an administrator.

3. Further, you can set a group policy to prevent blocking the file.

Group policy path:

User Configuration-> Administrative Templates-> Windows Components-> Attachment Manager

Policy name: Do not preserve zone information in file attachments

You can double click this policy and disabled it.

Note: Please note this will leave you vulnerable to malware & is not recommended..