Why are MSNBC web pages garbled on my system?

[AES/newspost]

I do a large amount of web surfing using a Mac iBook with OS 9.2, and
Netscape 7.0, and seldom encounter any page display problems -- except
for MSNBC news pages such as, for example

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5350645/

which I commonly get to by following links from Slate.

These pages uniformly display as a very wide page with typical
advertising stuff in the leftmost column, a blank middle section, and
the news text displaced far to the right, initially off screen, and
often overlaid on top of graphics or ads.

I don't encounter similar problems with web pages from any of the many
other sites I routinely visit, which suggest that my browser may not be
at fault -- yet it seems as if MS+ NBC should know how to write valid
HTML. I'm just wondering, more out of curiousity than any real need,
what the problem might be here -- my browser or their HTML?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

<posted & mailed>

AES/newspost wrote:

I do a large amount of web surfing using a Mac iBook with OS 9.2, and
Netscape 7.0, and seldom encounter any page display problems -- except
for MSNBC news pages such as, for example

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5350645/

which I commonly get to by following links from Slate.

These pages uniformly display as a very wide page with typical
advertising stuff in the leftmost column, a blank middle section, and
the news text displaced far to the right, initially off screen, and
often overlaid on top of graphics or ads.

I don't encounter similar problems with web pages from any of the many
other sites I routinely visit, which suggest that my browser may not be
at fault -- yet it seems as if MS+ NBC should know how to write valid
HTML. I'm just wondering, more out of curiousity than any real need,
what the problem might be here -- my browser or their HTML?

What I suspect is going on, is that Microsoft is breaking the pages on
purpose when it sees a Netscape Navigator identifier in the User-Agent; this
is a tactic Microsoft has used before against Opera (until someone called
them on it and exposed the whole ruse). It could be bona-fide bugs in
Netscape Navigator, as well.

As far as Microsoft and NBC knowing valid HTML, I wouldn't count on it. As
far as they are concerned, "valid" means IE can render it properly.

--
Shawn K. Quinn

[Brian]

Arne wrote:

Microsoft has never knowed what valid html is. They even
invented their own html, called mshtml

Don't recall I have seen any MS dtd,

Then there's no such thing as "mshtml".
But isn't it mshtml that is created when you "save as html" in
Word, Excel, Powerpoint ..... and maybe even Frontpage? Those files
renders properly only in IE :-)

A broken implementation of a flavor of HTML is not a new flavor.

--
Brian (remove ".invalid" to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Claire Tucker]

On Sat, 03 Jul 2004 21:49:47 GMT, Arne <ar********@tel ia.com> wrote:

But isn't it mshtml that is created when you "save as html" in Word,
Excel, Powerpoint ..... and maybe even Frontpage? Those files renders
properly only in IE :-)

As I recall, the HTML generated by Word is really XHTML with an
Office-specific XML namespace referenced alongside. If you were to
strip out the stuff in the Office namespace, you might find a sensible
XHTML document under there, although I wouldn't be surprised if there
was oddness.

Also, I think Word and so forth also imports the VML namespace and
uses it to create the office autoshapes and so forth. VML, in case you
are unaware, is essentially an XML application for describing Office
graphics. Internet Explorer has a renderer built in.

I've never heard any of this called MSHTML before. MSHTML.DLL is an
Internet Explorer component which provides, amongst other things, COM
classes for representing the HTML DOM and some HTML resources which
form Internet Explorer's "pretty" error messages. Perhaps it is this
which you have seen.

Take care,
-Claire

[Arne]

Claire Tucker wrote:

On Sat, 03 Jul 2004 21:49:47 GMT, Arne <ar********@tel ia.com> wrote:

But isn't it mshtml that is created when you "save as html" in Word,
Excel, Powerpoint ..... and maybe even Frontpage? Those files renders
properly only in IE :-)

As I recall, the HTML generated by Word is really XHTML with an
Office-specific XML namespace referenced alongside. If you were to
strip out the stuff in the Office namespace, you might find a sensible
XHTML document under there, although I wouldn't be surprised if there
was oddness.

Also, I think Word and so forth also imports the VML namespace and
uses it to create the office autoshapes and so forth. VML, in case you
are unaware, is essentially an XML application for describing Office
graphics. Internet Explorer has a renderer built in.

I've never heard any of this called MSHTML before. MSHTML.DLL is an
Internet Explorer component which provides, amongst other things, COM
classes for representing the HTML DOM and some HTML resources which
form Internet Explorer's "pretty" error messages. Perhaps it is this
which you have seen.

Take care,
-Claire

Yes Claire, I was just teaseing a bit over Microsoft. You saw my
smiley? :-)

BTW I have also noticed that mshtml.dll is used in some so called web
based wysiwyg editors. For what purpose I don't know, since you must
use IE to be able to use the "editor".

--
/Arne

[Claire Tucker]

On Sun, 04 Jul 2004 22:59:36 GMT, Arne <ar********@tel ia.com> wrote:

BTW I have also noticed that mshtml.dll is used in some so called web
based wysiwyg editors. For what purpose I don't know, since you must
use IE to be able to use the "editor".

mshtml also has an HTML editor component. You can see it in Outlook
Express when you compose an HTML message and also if you use Internet
Explorer's non-standard attribute whose name I forget to make an
element "editable".

The HTML editor is also a COM component -- I suspect just the normal
MSHTML renderer in a special mode -- so that application developers
can embed a basic HTML editor in an application.

-Claire

[Andy Dingley]

Claire Tucker <fa**@invalid.c om> wrote in message news:<r5******* *************** **********@4ax. com>...

As I recall, the HTML generated by Word is really XHTML with an
Office-specific XML namespace referenced alongside.

Which version of Word ? There are _big_ differences between them.

Word's use of HTML is bizarre, because of a design decision they made
early on. It was seen as important that users could save Word as HTML,
then re-load it into Word and re-generate an exactly equivalent Word
document - so-called "round-tripping". This is a worthy aim for
word-processor designers, but the question is whether it's _relevant_
to HTML authoring for the web.

Word is an awful HTML editor - because it's not even _trying_ to be
one (as a web tool).

Old Word versions make output that is nasty as an SGML document, let
alone HTML. Their bizarre mis-use of SGML comments as processing
directives is perhaps the most blatant.

Later Word versions move to a more well-formed XML approach, and as
you say they involved namespaces. These are much easier to work with -
they're still aberrant (X)HTML, but at least some trivial stripping of
the namespaced elements can make them resemble the real stuff.
Non of Word's output, in any version, is fit for use as "web grade"
HTML. None of it can be turned into "web-HTML" without more work than
would be saved by using a better authoring tool in the first place.