Using Firefox, but I want a link to open in Internet Explorer Options

[Styler001]

I'm really not sure about posting this here since this is geared more towards website programming, but I posted on another HTML help forum a week ago and all I'm hearing there are crickets.

If this should be removed from here, I'll understand.

Anyway, here's what I posted in the other forum...

My preferred choice of browser at work is Firefox. This works for almost all websites or apps I need to use/visit. However, there are a few apps we use that won't work on Firefox that we have to use Internet Explorer to open.

I made myself an HTML menu for the sites I use most often, but, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to get this one line of code to work. That's not the real site I want to access with Internet Explorer since the site I need is my company's internal site and I shouldn't show that here. I'll just use Google as an example, hoping the process would be the same for my company's site.

CODE

<td><a href="file:"/c:/Program Files/Internet Explorer/iexplore.exe " http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google</a></td>

I'm pretty sure part of the problem is the quotes within the quotes. But I'm sure there's probably more to the problem than that. I've tried using the single quote and the &_quot; (without the _ but it won't let me type that here without displaying quotation marks) options, but couldn't get those to work either.

Again, I know this may not belong on this forum, but if anyone can help, I'd appreciate it.

[Styler001]

Hmmm. Forgot about the "send link to..." option, but, honestly, I'm probably not going to remember every time I go to click a link that needs to be opened in IE.

And I kinda figured my quotes were screwy. I played around with so many different configurations of them, I'm suprised they're aren't more quotes in there than there already are.

Even though you say this won't work, could you show me how the quotes within quotes should be set up in case I come across something where I need to deal with them again?

[pandy]

I don't know. It's not like there is a syntax for what you try to do... since you can't do it. But quote wise, one problem is the single quote in the middle with spaces around it.

CODE

href="file:"/c:/Program Files/Internet Explorer/iexplore.exe " http://www.google.com"
                                                            ^^^

I assume you mean to quote the URL/path to iexplore.exe? Then there should be no space before the quote. <a href="http://google.com ">Google</a> might work, but if it does it's because of browser correction.

Another problem is that you have put quotes around the path part of the URL at all. It's like writing.

CODE

<a href="http:'//google.com'">Google</a>

You quote the WHOLE URL, not part of it.

And that's one way to nest quotes, where nested quotes are allowed. Alternate double and single quotes. But I can think of few occasions in HTML when nested quotes could occur. The ones I can think of involve a string that is somehow passed... Like if I use mailto and there's a body text with quotes. But then they should be URL encoded. Alternating quotes won't do. Like this (the spaces and other characters that aren't allowed in URLs also should be URL encoded).

CODE

<a href="mailto:someone@example.com"?subject=Hamlet&body=Hamlet%20said:%20%22To%20be%20or%20not%20to%20be%2C%20that%20is%20the%20question.%22.">

But if you use JavaScript to write HTML, nested quotes are common and then alternating double and single quotes works. I still rather escape them. In the case of JavaScript with a backslash.

CODE

document.write('Hamlet said: "To be or not to be, that is the question."');

document.write("Hamlet said: \"To be or not to be, that is the question.\"");