Treeline's Beta Page Version Two..

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Treeline

Treeline

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With many thanks (yet again) to drstawl and Adelphia techs!

Try out the new and improved version and let me know what you think. Click on the WWW icon below...
 
Nice.

I saw this in the cave and was gonna reply, but then I saw it was here and thought I may as well post here.

Good site.
 
Could somebody vett the main pages a bit using a Netscape browser?

I had some feedback that A Guitarist's Paradise produced only the guitar graphic and not the collection of links and redirects. Today I accessed the page from a Netscape browser at a music store and encountered the same problem, although IE captures all the links. There should be a menu of 14 or 15 places to go collected on the right side of the page. Thanks!
 
Yeah, it appears to be narfed up in Netscape 6, though it appears fine in IE and in Netscape 4.7x.

I'll take a look at it as soon as I get the kids off... I hope I can see what's wrong amidst all the useless Word XML crapola in the file.

Which comes back to the point I made way earlier about using Word to craft web pages -- if something like this happens to you, it's very difficult to spot what's wrong.

Back at you later...

-AlChuck
 
OK, kids gone, whew...

Now... I just spent fifteen or twenty minutes looking at your page. As is, the text and links do not appear in Netscape 6, as you already know.

So here's the bottom line:

either your Word document is oddly formed

or

its complexity is such that Netscape 6 cannot parse it correctly.

You can either

(1) try to figure out why the page generated by Word's Save as Web Page command is so complex and make it simpler [not my recommendation]

(2) Download that Word plug-in or add-on that allows you to save a file as so-called "Compact HTML" (leave it to Microsoft to come up with a name like that for something that should more accurately be called "actual correct HTML"). I mentioned it in your earlier thread when you first put up the site. The link is:

http://office.microsoft.com/Downloads/2000/Msohtmf2.aspx

Install it, re-open your Word files. On the File menu, point to Export To and then click Compact HTML, instead of doing the usual Save As Web Page. [This is probably the best short-term fix]

(3) Stop using Word, learn HTML, and get a decent web page editor like Dreamweaver... [the best thing to do in the long run if you are truly interested in doing web pages going forward]


What follows is some detail about what I think is wrong. 90% of it will probably be gibberish to you, so ignore it at your discretion, but it helps to understand the motivation for my recommendations.

OK, deep breath -- here we go --

What I did was try to identify elements and sections and such and see if I could make it look right.

I made two guesses, cut and pasted sections into another HTML page, and it all appeared again.

Third try was the charm... I started again with the whole page and started taking some things out, and found something that , when removed, made the links visible again.

The problem seems to be that there is some code in there that is being executed. I'm not clear if it's supposed to be executed by the browser (it's definitely not JavaScript) or if it's something in the Word source and so should all be just interpreted as comments by the browser. I'll guess the latter.

One block seems to be setting up HTML character attributes using a span tag. Seems that if this, the span tag is written one way, and if another, the span tag is written a different way.

It seems like the nesting of that, or the way the comment stuff is wrapped around, is just plain not quite right, and so Netscape 6 can't render it properly. I can't spot exactly what it is that's troublesome, and even if I could it would be useless to you because all that crap is being automatically generated by Word and so without knowing how and why Word thinks all that complex crap should be there, we can only edit it after the fact in the "HTML" file.

Why should it appear fine in IE and Netscape 4.7, for that matter, but not Netscape 6? Well, this happens a lot in the world of web pages. IE, for one thing, has alswyas been a very forgiving browser, and if something in the HTML is not quite right, it will do its damnedest to display whatever it can anyway. Netscape, on the other hand, as always been much more particular about the HTML being correct, and it usually just fails to display much of anything rather than guess once it hits something it can';t make sense of.

Ironically, Netscape 6.x is supposed to be the version that has come into compliance with HTML 4.0 in the same way that IE has been for a while, so on the face of it one usually expects IE and Netscape 6 to get stuff more or less the same...
 
Ack, I tried the page with the HTML Filter and it's still bad.

I think the root of your problem is that you don't know how to use Word correctly :)

You are using a text box next to an image. The text box is floating. It's anybody's guess how Word is going to make that arrangement make any sense when it's converted into HTML -- and apparently it doesn't quite correctly. It would far more sensible and HTML-like to make a one-row, two-column table and put the picture in the left cell and the text in the right cell.

You are also not using styles for the paragraphs, but manually overriding the attributes. Word is too stupid to do anything beyond mimicing this as best it can in HTML, which leads to stuff like tagging paragraphs with an HTML style and then wrapping span tags around it -- often multiple ones -- to alter the appearance that the style calls for. Makes it really messy and much bigger of a file than it needs to be.

If you want to use Word as an HTML editior you really need to know how to use styles and not just paint on your formatting. Otherwise it will just blidnly try to render stuff as best it can and you'll constantly have these kinds of problems (pages that don't appear in some browsers, or appear totally differently).
 
Wow!!

Thank you for spending this kind of time doing the diagnostics! I'll have to read the posts a few times, but I think I'm getting the gist of it, and you are spot on that I overrode everything to do a "this looks right" page.

OK.

Maybe then the first thing to do is to re-edit the Guitarist's Paradise page as two columns, as you suggested, plant the pic in one and the links in the other. Then go from there.

I can see that an HTML learning curve isn't going away any time soon...:D

Thanks again for your help. Between you, drstawl, and the Adelphia techs, I've managed to stay out of a padded cell for the time being.:cool:
 
Maybe then the first thing to do is to re-edit the Guitarist's Paradise page as two columns, as you suggested, plant the pic in one and the links in the other.

Make sure you make a table, not columns as in newspaper-type columns on a page (you can do that in Word too...) It would probably work but I usually advise keeping it as simple as possible when you're going to migrate the document to HTML.

I'll have to read the posts a few times...
You do have lots of spare time, don't you ;)
 
OK, One thing at a time...

Does the page load correctly now?

(Main page -> A Guitarist's Paradise; should be links and redirects on right side of page).

Thanks!
 
You got it, my man! Good one! While I have your attention, though, another point to make...

Your guitar image there is a meg -- it's huge, and takes a noticeable time to appear in place on the page even for me here with a DSL connection. It doesn't need to be this big -- and in fact, in your Word/XML doc, it's forced to display smaller than it is. This is silly because if the file is larger than it is being shown at, there's two things workign against you : (1) you waste bandwidth sending a full size image that the user's browser is going to scale down at the end anyway, and (2) browsers are not that great at scaling images down -- the quality of the image is much less crisp than if it was just made that size in your graphics program in the first place. That is, any graphics tool will do a better job of resizing an image than a browser window can. If you made it the right size in the first place, it would only need to be a coupla dozen KB and would load much faster.
 
OK, Cap'n!

Better now?

Thx as always...

:cool:
 
Last edited:
Added a Feature

Treeline's Picks!!!

Used your suggestion of tables. I have to figure out the size of the pic and might be able to get it down a little, but there's some resolution issues so it's staying that way for a bit.

The idea is to showcase a local production from time to time.
 
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