WebView works on android 2.3.3, shows blank page on 4.0.1

Question

I don't think this is a duplicate, but this question may be relevant.

As of title: this works perfectly on android 2.3.3, randomly shows a blank page on 4.0.1. It usually works at first, then start displaying blank pages until the application is reinstalled.

The code I'm using to display a simple (html only) webpage is a follows:

@Override
public void afterTextChanged(final Editable arg0){
    final String result = getResult();
    final String base64 = encode(result);
    //This is the WebView
    results.loadData(base64, "text/html; charset=utf-8", "base64");
}

private String encode(final String value){
    try{
        final byte[] bytes = value.getBytes("UTF-8");
        final String base64 = Base64.encodeToString(bytes,
                              android.util.Base64.DEFAULT);
        return base64;
    }
    catch(UnsupportedEncodingException e){
        return "YOULOOZE";
    }
}

Answer 1

Check that your HTML is well formatted. I am not sure of the Doctype it validates against.

This happened to me because I used

<script ... />

instead of

<script ...></script>

Any tiny error will make your webview fail silently.

Answer 2

I'm not sure that is your solution but can help. Since Android 4.0 WebKit updated into version 534.30. I noticed that on some web pages, after it has completed loading, the WebView redirects its content to a new page that says the following: "Webpage not available The webpage at file:///android_asset/webkit/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address". This is bug of new version of WebKit, in my case javascript from assets folder don't work in offline.