Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : html differences, netscape vs. IE
Justin_artist
08-06-2003, 08:35 PM
Hello everyone, first off I'm new to this bulletin board but it looks great. I've been doing html for about 2 years (self taught) and never fully understood the difference in the way IE and netscape handle the html. I create the html pages using notepad and check them in ie6. I now am trying to crack this, so downloaded netscape 7.1 and the format is messed up. The site is http://www.artistpaintingsandprints.com and if anyone can tell me how to fix the errors I would be greatful. Thanks for you time.
PeOfEo
08-06-2003, 09:06 PM
The errors are not in netscape they are probably in ie. IE handles code a a lot differently then other browsers especially css. Netscape uses source codes from mozilla which I would like to say is better then ie. One thing I am noticing is that your page has issues in ie too. For one your images are not aligning the way you probably want them too, why not use image headers instead of using soo many cells and the plain text, and I see you are nesting your tables which is not a good thing.
You need to fix up the coding first of all. Your pages should start with a valid doctype (see http://www.webdevfaqs.com/html.php#doctype for more info) and a charset definition (probably <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">). Next, as PeOfEo stated, you have many nested tables. That is not good. The W3C recommends that we use CSS for layout. This isn't always possible, but when it is, it should be done. In a perfect world, we would be able to separate content from layout entirely, but that time has not come... yet. Either way, your site should use valid code. You have many tags that have been depreciated, such as the center tag, the font tag, etc. Removing all those excess tags (and replacing them with CSS) will clean your code up considerably. Once you think your getting close (or, before you start, so you know what you have to do) run your pages through the W3C Validator (http://validator.w3.org), and fix up any of the errors it spits out.
I took the liberty of running your site through the validator. In HTML 4.01 Strict mode, you have 747 errors. Woah...
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.artistpaintingsandprints.com%2F&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Strict&verbose=1
In HTML 4.01 Transitional, you have 460...
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.artistpaintingsandprints.com%2F&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional&verbose=1
I'd start fixing up those errors, and also start reading up on the specs to find out which tags are and are not valid:
HTML 4.01 (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/)
CSS (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/)
Justin_artist
08-06-2003, 10:09 PM
Thanks alot guys, I changed the doctype and added the content-type and it looks much better in Netscape now. I'm going through all the smaller things on the validator now. Thanks again!
And an explination of why...
A doctype tells the browser what version of HTML to expect. If no doctype is specified, the browser falls into quirks mode -- it handles the HTML the way it wants to, rather than according to any standard. This is why we must always specify a doctype on our pages. It will help ensure that the HTML behaves as we want it to.
Justin_artist
08-06-2003, 10:48 PM
The page looks much better, but when I run it through the validator, a big banner says "This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional!" then lists all the problems. Any ideas what would fix that? Thanks again.
The validator will tell you what the problem is. There is also a link you can click called explain, which will tell you why that particular bit of code caused a problem.
For instance, this error:
Line 12, column 29: required attribute "TYPE" not specified (explain...). is because your script tag should read:
<script type="text/javascript">
or this error:
Line 33, column 73: required attribute "ALT" not specified (explain...). is because you didn't specife an alt attribute for an image tag.
Or this one:
Line 51, column 81: end tag for "CENTER" omitted, but its declaration does not permit this (explain...). is because you opened a <center> tag (which wouldn't even be valid in Strict mode) without closing it.
BTW, whereabouts in Wisconsin are you from?
Justin_artist
08-07-2003, 12:09 AM
Thanks for your help pyro, if you want to give me a link I will throw it up on my site for ya. Since I didn't have the doctype and charset right, would that affect my search engine ranking? I live by Oshkosh, what about you?
The link to my site can be found on the bottom of each of my posts. I'm not sure if a doctype has much to do with your search engine rating, but the invalid code probably did.
I live in norther Wisconsin, Minocqua to be specific.
PeOfEo
08-07-2003, 04:45 PM
Well you fixed up your layout from what I can see but you are still using nested tables :( Oh well atleast it looks the way it is supposed to.
Justin_artist
08-08-2003, 01:13 AM
Well ya, I'm still using nested tables because I'm not sure how else to lay it out like that. I think someone suggested using css for that. Well I'm reading up on css now and implementing it more and more into my sites. Are there any links you know of to help me with this? Thanks again guys.
Take a look at http://www.w3schools.com/css/ and http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/