Mark of the Web (MOTW) and Xara Xtreme 5

[Trev501]

Hi All, I recently bought this software and posted a thread here a few days ago about a problem I had opening pdf files when the Web Pages were located on a local HDD or on a CD. That thread died without resolution of the problem hence this new thread. Please stick with this to the end, I believe I have found the solution and think this is important enough to be widely known by Xara users.

To recap; if I place my files on a CD and run index.htm using IE, FF or Chrome the pages appear on screen and everything works as expected until I try to access a pdf file on the CD. Then, FF and Chrome open the file within the browser however IE does absolutely nothing, no error reports just an inactive link button. If I transfer the same files to the internet all functions perform correctly in IE. If I transfer the files to my NAS storage disk on my local network the files again work as expected. If I transfer the files to a local HDD (eg. drives C or D etc.) or run directly from the CD as described earlier then I get the same problem.

Someone on a Microsoft Forum suggested that Mark of the Web or MOTW might be the answer to my problem so I did a bit of googling to see what this was about. Whilst looking I came across this comment
" Don Lammers from Shadow Mountain has informed me that MOTW, when used locally, will prevent links to a PDF from opening, and users don't receive any warning as to why the links aren't working. If you have to create links to PDF files, you won't be able to use MOTW."

It described my symptoms perfectly! As I seem to be unable to look at and edit the html files using Xara Xtreme, I opened my .htm files in Frontpage and looked at the html version where I found the following line in each:
<!-- saved from url=(0020)http://www.xara.com/ -->
This is a MOTW file so I removed this line of code and re-ran the web pages. This time they worked perfectly under IE.

Bottom line seems to be if you want to run your software either on your local HDDs or CD, and have links to .pdf files, then remove this reference to MOTW in each of your .htm files.

HTH
Trev

[steve.ledger]

Thanks for the feedback Trev, I'll be interested in Covoxers response to this.
Meanwhile I have moved your thread to the correct forum for Web related topics.

[covoxer]

You are right. This was already commented on this forum at least in two threads:
http://talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=38801
http://talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=41490

[Trev501]

Thanks John, I wish I had found those a week or so ago, it would have saved me a lot of time. I think its important enough to be in the Xara help files on the CD. There are probably not many who want to run their pages locally from a CD, but for those that do it would be very useful.
Cheers,
Trev