Last year I had a strange issue with our Moodle 1.6 site. Sometimes pages were sent out with no stylesheet or an incomplete stylesheet or without the HTML editor. Reloading the page solved the problem.
The problem completely dissappeared when I manually assembled all the styles in one big .css file. I did the same with the javascript for the editor: I put everything inside a .js file. Now the HTML editor works again (but you can't access the course file area because that's where the PHP part iss needed for.)
That's why I think it must somehow be related to the way Moodle uses PHP to assemble the CSS and javascript necessary for the stylesheets and the html editor.
This summer someone on the Dutch Moodle community and this user reported similar issues with Moodle 1.8 and Moodle 1.9 on a specific server. That's why I really want to solve this issue. Can someone more experienced tell me ...
How does PHP send out files as javascript / css? Is it possible that on some servers the PHP script to make the javascript for the HTML editor only finishes when the rest of the page is already served? How do we troubleshoot this kind of error? I found and installed a FF extension which shows live HTTP headers for every file my browser requests. Is there information to be found there?
You can read the start of this discussion here. I have put a new question here, because Rob and I both think the issue is not related to the javascript used by the HTML editor, but is some kind of server error. Can someone please help us find out what is going wrong?