Problems with website display

[Bill Davidson]

My wife's friend had a website built for his company, and it looks great
using a PC.

When viewed on a Mac using either Safari or Explorer the formatting is
terrible. The home page is not too bad, however, any of the other pages
selected have large spaces between paragraphs.

I know to compare different browers when building a website but what can
I suggest to him for PC/Mac problems.

The website is at: http://www.estatenet.ca/
Comments & suggestions appreciated.
bill, toronto

[Barry Pearson]

Bill Davidson wrote:

My wife's friend had a website built for his company, and it looks
great using a PC.

When viewed on a Mac using either Safari or Explorer the formatting is
terrible. The home page is not too bad, however, any of the other
pages selected have large spaces between paragraphs.

I know to compare different browers when building a website but what
can I suggest to him for PC/Mac problems.

The website is at: http://www.estatenet.ca/

You (they) have some dodgy CSS. For example, it starts:

textarea{ color: #303030; font-family : Arial, Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica,
sans-serif; font-size : 11px; }

Perhaps this was supposed to be ".textarea"?

Also, there should be no space between numbers & units in (say) "line-height:
12 px" elsewhere. That could do strange things if the browser treated it as
"line-height: 12;", instead of ignoring it.

It might be worth while putting in DOCTYPEs, then validating both HTML & CSS
at W3C, to see what other bugs it can find. At least then you will know
whether you have typos or something more fundamental.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[Bill Davidson]

In article <Yl***************@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net>,
"Barry Pearson" <ne**@childsupportanalysis.co.uk> wrote:

Bill Davidson wrote:

My wife's friend had a website built for his company, and it looks
great using a PC.

When viewed on a Mac using either Safari or Explorer the formatting is
terrible. The home page is not too bad, however, any of the other
pages selected have large spaces between paragraphs.

I know to compare different browers when building a website but what
can I suggest to him for PC/Mac problems.

The website is at: http://www.estatenet.ca/

You (they) have some dodgy CSS. For example, it starts:

textarea{ color: #303030; font-family : Arial, Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica,
sans-serif; font-size : 11px; }

Perhaps this was supposed to be ".textarea"?

Also, there should be no space between numbers & units in (say) "line-height:
12 px" elsewhere. That could do strange things if the browser treated it as
"line-height: 12;", instead of ignoring it.

It might be worth while putting in DOCTYPEs, then validating both HTML & CSS
at W3C, to see what other bugs it can find. At least then you will know
whether you have typos or something more fundamental.

Thanks for your input Barry.

bill

[Brian]

Barry Pearson wrote:

Bill Davidson wrote:

The website is at: http://www.estatenet.ca/

You (they) have some dodgy CSS. For example, it starts:

textarea{ color: #303030; font-family : Arial, Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica,
sans-serif; font-size : 11px; }

Perhaps this was supposed to be ".textarea"?

What is wrong (syntactically) with styling the textarea element?

--
Brian (follow directions in my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Barry Pearson]

Brian wrote:

Barry Pearson wrote:

Bill Davidson wrote:

The website is at: http://www.estatenet.ca/

You (they) have some dodgy CSS. For example, it starts:

textarea{ color: #303030; font-family : Arial, Verdana, Geneva,
Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size : 11px; }

Perhaps this was supposed to be ".textarea"?

What is wrong (syntactically) with styling the textarea element?

That is for Bill Davidson to decide. I simply asked a tentative question.

The CSS uses a type selector, and would be suitable for an element of document
language element type "textarea", eg. <textarea>. If there *is* one - OK. I
suspect there isn't, and it is really supposed to be a class selector, hence
my comment. But Bill can decide.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[Michael Winter]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 23:43:51 -0000, Barry Pearson
<ne**@childsupportanalysis.co.uk> wrote:

The CSS uses a type selector, and would be suitable for an element
of document language element type "textarea", eg. <textarea>. If
there *is* one - OK. I suspect there isn't, and it is really
supposed to be a class selector, hence my comment. But Bill can
decide.

Are you casting doubt on the existence of the TEXTAREA element here, or am
I just interpreting your post incorrectly?

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.7

Mike

--
Michael Winter
M.******@blueyonder.co.invalid (replace ".invalid" with ".uk" to reply)

[Barry Pearson]

Michael Winter wrote:

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 23:43:51 -0000, Barry Pearson
<ne**@childsupportanalysis.co.uk> wrote:

The CSS uses a type selector, and would be suitable for an element
of document language element type "textarea", eg. <textarea>. If
there *is* one - OK. I suspect there isn't, and it is really
supposed to be a class selector, hence my comment. But Bill can
decide.

Are you casting doubt on the existence of the TEXTAREA element here,
or am I just interpreting your post incorrectly?
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.7

I was just querying it. It may be relevant to the "contact" page. It is up to
Bill to decide - I can't do that. Ask him, not me!

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[kchayka]

Bill Davidson wrote:

My wife's friend had a website built for his company, and it looks great
using a PC.
Hmm, I guess "looks great" is also dependent on using a particular
window size and text size, eh?
When viewed on a Mac using either Safari or Explorer the formatting is
terrible. The home page is not too bad, however, any of the other pages
selected have large spaces between paragraphs.
The home page has some huge gaps, too.
I know to compare different browers when building a website but what can
I suggest to him for PC/Mac problems.
I doubt it is specifically a PC/Mac issue, but more likely a result of
all those nested layout tables. The code is a pile of sludge that needs
some serious cleaning up.
The website is at: http://www.estatenet.ca/

Comments & suggestions appreciated.

Start over?

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Please reply to the group so everyone can share.

[Bill Davidson]

In article <c1*************@ID-224809.news.uni-berlin.de>,
kchayka <us****@c-net.us> wrote:

Bill Davidson wrote:

My wife's friend had a website built for his company, and it looks great
using a PC.

Hmm, I guess "looks great" is also dependent on using a particular
window size and text size, eh?

When viewed on a Mac using either Safari or Explorer the formatting is
terrible. The home page is not too bad, however, any of the other pages
selected have large spaces between paragraphs.

The home page has some huge gaps, too.

I know to compare different browers when building a website but what can
I suggest to him for PC/Mac problems.

I doubt it is specifically a PC/Mac issue, but more likely a result of
all those nested layout tables. The code is a pile of sludge that needs
some serious cleaning up.

The website is at: http://www.estatenet.ca/

Comments & suggestions appreciated.

Start over?

Thanks everyone, I'll see what the owners of the business has to say.
bill

[Brian]

Barry Pearson wrote:

The CSS uses a type selector, and would be suitable for an element
of document language element type "textarea"
What does that mean? "element of document language element type?"
eg. <textarea>. If there *is* one - OK. I suspect there isn't,

I assure you there is.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interac...#edef-TEXTAREA

--
Brian (follow directions in my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Andy Dingley]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 18:45:20 -0500, Bill Davidson
<bi**@williamdavidson.com> wrote:

My wife's friend had a website built for his company,

When ? That code is pure 1997. It really doesn't cut it for
today's standards - it fails on non-IE browsers, non-PC devices,
non-mainstream screen sizes/resolutions, it makes no attempt at
accessibility and the coding is generally sloppy.

--
Smert' spamionam

[Bill Davidson]

In article <kUaZb.78576$jk2.419582@attbi_s53>,
Brian <us*****@julietremblay.com.invalid-remove-this-part> wrote:

Barry Pearson wrote:

The CSS uses a type selector, and would be suitable for an element
of document language element type "textarea"

What does that mean? "element of document language element type?"

eg. <textarea>. If there *is* one - OK. I suspect there isn't,

I assure you there is.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interac...#edef-TEXTAREA

Update:
My wife suggested he call the company who put the website together and
tell them the site does not show properly on Macs.
Answer: "there is nothing we can do about it"
bill

[BJ in Texas]

Bill Davidson wrote:

Update:
My wife suggested he call the company who put the website
together and tell them the site does not show properly on
Macs.
Answer: "there is nothing we can do about it"
bill

Next suggestion is that they give the same reply when he
attempts to bill them... Assuming they didn't pay before
checking.

BJ

[Barry Pearson]

Bill Davidson wrote:
[snip]

Update:

My wife suggested he call the company who put the website together and
tell them the site does not show properly on Macs.

Answer: "there is nothing we can do about it"

Sometimes you have to stop banging your head against the wall and walk away.
But it would be interesting (although probably too late now) to know the
reason behind that. Sometimes people just can tolerate yet another problem on
their agenda. Well ... you tried.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, Bill Davidson wrote:

Update:
My wife suggested he call the company who put the website together and
tell them the site does not show properly on Macs.
Answer: "there is nothing we can do about it"

No surprises there. Notice they didn't say "nothing can be done about
it", merely that they weren't able to do it.

[Andrew Glasgow]

In article <bi************************@nr-ott01.bellnexxia.net>,
Bill Davidson <bi**@williamdavidson.com> wrote:

In article <kUaZb.78576$jk2.419582@attbi_s53>,
Brian <us*****@julietremblay.com.invalid-remove-this-part> wrote:

Barry Pearson wrote:

The CSS uses a type selector, and would be suitable for an element
of document language element type "textarea"

What does that mean? "element of document language element type?"

eg. <textarea>. If there *is* one - OK. I suspect there isn't,

I assure you there is.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interac...#edef-TEXTAREA

Update:
My wife suggested he call the company who put the website together and
tell them the site does not show properly on Macs.
Answer: "there is nothing we can do about it"

What they mean is 'We don't care'.

--
| Andrew Glasgow <amg39(at)cornell.edu> |
| "This site was constructed with FrontPage. We regret any inconvenience and |
| irritation this may cause. We're sorry about the whole thing, really, but |
| Frontpage seemed like a good idea at the time." -- Jerry Muelver in alt.html|

[Andrew Thompson]

Andrew Glasgow wrote:

In article ,
Bill Davidson wrote:

....

My wife suggested he call the company who put the website together
and
tell them the site does not show properly on Macs. .... Answer: "there is nothing we can do about it"

What they mean is 'We don't care'.

Is there any gaurantee as to useability
in the agreement to create the site?

I was thinking that something along this line..
"..contracted to construct a web site
for use, 'and useable on', the World Wide Web*..."
...should be expected in a site for the WWW
(which probably means it is not)

* One might expect a percentage there, as
I guess that many companies would neither
expect their site to work on Lynx, nor care..

--
Andrew Thompson
* http://www.PhySci.org/ Open-source software suite
* http://www.PhySci.org/codes/ Web & IT Help
* http://www.1point1C.org/ Science & Technology

[kchayka]

Bill Davidson wrote:

My wife suggested he call the company who put the website together and
tell them the site does not show properly on Macs.

Answer: "there is nothing we can do about it"

Considering the state of the code, I take this to mean they use
Dreamweaver (or some other WYSIWYG editor) and don't really know the
first thing about coding HTML.

IOW, this is what the editor spewed out and they don't know how it
works, so they don't know how to fix it.

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[Matthias Gutfeldt]

kchayka schrieb:

Bill Davidson wrote:

My wife suggested he call the company who put the website together and
tell them the site does not show properly on Macs.

Answer: "there is nothing we can do about it"
Considering the state of the code, I take this to mean they use
Dreamweaver (or some other WYSIWYG editor) and don't really know the
first thing about coding HTML.

I take this to mean you don't know the first thing about Dreamweaver -
it simply doesn't produce that kind of code. Attributes are usually
within "", not sometimes without quotes and sometimes in single quotes.
And DW javascripts have that tell-tale MM_ label and are ridiculously
complex, quite unlike the scripts on that site.

IOW, this is what the editor spewed out and they don't know how it
works, so they don't know how to fix it.

No, the code actually looks hand-coded, it's so inconsistent.
The site seems to be assembled with PHP. Perhaps the company that built
it (http://www.moneymaker4agents.com) knows how to write a PHP CMS, and
has a graphic designer for the pretty images, but doesn't have anybody
on board who knows how to write proper HTML/CSS.
Matthias

[kchayka]

Matthias Gutfeldt wrote:

kchayka schrieb:

Considering the state of the code, I take this to mean they use
Dreamweaver (or some other WYSIWYG editor) and don't really know the
first thing about coding HTML.
I take this to mean you don't know the first thing about Dreamweaver -

Um, I only used Dreamweaver as an example of a so-called WYSIWYG editor.
They could have made templates in FrontPage or even PhotoShop for all
I know. The particular tool isn't really relevant. If my reference to
Dreamweaver offended you, then just subsitute "PhotoShop" or something
else that generates HTML. OK?

BTW, Dreamweaver certainly can generate crappy, bloated HTML. It all
depends on the skills of the user, or lack thereof. Older editor
versions are generally worse than newer ones, too. Not everyone is an
expert using the latest MX, you know.

IOW, this is what the editor spewed out and they don't know how it
works, so they don't know how to fix it.

No, the code actually looks hand-coded, it's so inconsistent.

Consistency has little to do with it, methinks. Surely you've seen the
sludge FrontPage can spit out? Besides, I can't believe anybody would
hand-code nested tables like that. To me it screams graphical editor
doing its worst.
The site seems to be assembled with PHP.
Are you saying you can't write PHP code with Dreamweaver or some other
like editor, or perhaps that PHP has some magical functionality that
automatically generates code like that? ;)
Perhaps the company that built
it (http://www.moneymaker4agents.com) knows how to write a PHP CMS, and
has a graphic designer for the pretty images, but doesn't have anybody
on board who knows how to write proper HTML/CSS.

How specifically the code got into the state it's in isn't really
important, but keep in mind that a graphic designer isn't likely to
hand-code HTML, but use a graphical tool to create a layout and generate
the code/template. Regardless, per your last statement you actually do
agree with me, that's good enough.

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