What is it about AOL anyway ?

[Kim L. Ground]

Any help would be appreciated, as I am very new to this. I have put up a website at falconlabs.com It seems to work well with most all browsers, highspeed or dial up connection, etc. EXCEPT AOL. I am getting a range of complaints from AOL people from 'can't display this page' errors, graphics that don't load (they get the little box with an x in it) or even graphics load but button graphics don't activate their links.
All my graphics are small, most well under 10kb and only a very few approaching 100kb, all are jpg or gif format (sometimes I used 'optimized' gif palette when exporting from my art program). I have no fancy frames, scripts, or activeX happening, but still AOL doesn't like me. I have gone onto AOL's webmaster site and read everything that would seem to apply -- no help there.
Anybody got any ideas ???

[MotherNatrsSon]

Well it is amazing that that page loads in any browser. What a coding nightmare you have there...LOL

You have some xhtml, you have some html, you have some micrjunk cr*p in there. No doctype at the top of the page.

With a 4.01 transitional doctype, here are the errors

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ffalconlabs.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional


With an XHTML 1.0 transitional, here are your erros.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ffalconlabs.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=XHTML+1.0+Transitional

Either way you got quite the mess.

MNS

edit: They don't call it AOHell for nuttin'

[Aronya1]

My money says the problem is that you used Word to create the page. Use something else. You're doing a very simple, straightforward site. Basic HTML will handle it. Grab a book & open Notepad. It won't take you long.

[Dark Dragon]

Is there supposed to be something on the very right hand side???

Maybe you should add a bottom scrollbar if there is.

[Kim L. Ground]

You are right. I did in fact use Word to build it, and I thought I was being so smart, getting word to use those pix as 'background' and not having to write any HTML at all.
And I sort of wondered whether all of that 'Microcr@p' was really necessary. I mean, what does the browser care what company name I use, right ? But i didn't like the way Front Page tried to fit everything I did into it's preferred system of frames and file structure ... And then the art program I tried to use would export html, but then I had to start over from sctratch if anything needed changes. Suppose it's either learn HTML or buy a real web authoring program ...

Thanks, Master of the Web, for the detailed error analysis -- if I study HTML some more I may be able to understand what you have written. I did say 'most' browsers -- of course I haven't tested it on all.

So, just one more dumb question please: how feasable is it to start stripping out all the crud that I can't identify any purpose for to fix this, or am I better off just starting from scratch ? (Bear in mind that I will have to learn syntax for every HTML statement to know how to start if I go from scratch, whereas I can just look up the lines that are used in the word generated document if I try to fix what I have there by editing the HTML. That seems like it might be an easier way to learn.)

Thanks again for the help !!

[MotherNatrsSon]

If you are going to have a site, you will be in a far better position if you just suck it up and learn it now. Scrap it and start from scratch. Leave what you have up and work on a "relacement" from scratch.

My 2¢

MNS

[Aronya1]

Originally posted by Kim L. Ground
Thanks, Master of the Web, for the detailed error analysis --

I believe that's , Supreme Master of the Web... :p

[Kim L. Ground]

And WHICH Supreme master fo' the web would that be ??
(two are posting here)

[MotherNatrsSon]

Originally posted by Kim L. Ground
And WHICH Supreme master fo' the web would that be ??
(two are posting here)

LOL I guess that is the title the form gives you after 150 posts or something.

I don't think there is a supreme master of the web. If theree is the "master" wouldn't bother posting on a message board. Be way too busy keeping it all runnig for us.....LOL

MNS

[Aronya1]

Originally posted by Kim L. Ground
And WHICH Supreme master fo' the web would that be ??
(two are posting here)
Hey! Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't noticed. Guess I'll have to update my resume...

[Kim L. Ground]

Well, I may be making progress, but now I am stuck again.

I got a bunch of reference materials on authoring html and have been trying to clean up one of my pages for a start.
It's at http://falconlabs.com/TEST/test.htm

My problem is that I can't figure out why the first two lines of yellow text are properly moved off the left margin while the red text and buttons are stuck to the left margin.

I know that the spaces inserted after <nobr> aren't doing anything because changing them doesn't move the text around. (Yes, I did cut and paste some stuff from the original Word produced document.) Are there some hidden characters in the yellow text lines that my (notepad) text editor is not showing me, or what ?

(I guess the general question here, that is not answered in anyof the basic reference materials I have is: how do I move text and buttons to the right without having to insert a whole string of &nbsp; ?)

Does this have something to do with "@page Section 1" in the style definitions and the point numbers that follow ?

And can i do away with all of the style definitions in the header if i define styles in each line as i have done ? Do I need the font defintions for my page to be viewable on non-Microsoft platforms ?

Thanks again

All Hail the Supreme Masters of the Web

[Aronya1]

Hi Kim,

My first suggestion is write your page without all of the style & font stuff. Strip out everything except the basic code. One thing that I see in your code is that your <p> tags are never closed. They all look like this: "<p" Strange as that is, it seems to still work, at least in IE. Actually, you could probably eliminate those tags entirely on this page.

Another thing I've never seen (but still works) is using single ( ' ) apostrophies instead of ( " ) quote signs.
<p><span style='font-size: 18.0pt;font-family:"Arial Black";color:red'> could be written as
<p><span style="font-size: 18.0pt; font-family:Arial Black; color:red">
I don't know if it matters, and I won't claim to care, as long as it works. We'll both hear about it if it's not valid code. ;)

"<p>&nbsp;</span></p>" could be shortened to: "&nbsp;" (I'm having trouble getting the symbol for a space to show in my post; use the characters between your <p> & </span> tags) and that's a closing tag for a <span> that was never opened.

The spacing of your text has something to do with copying & pasting from Word. If you remove the blank space between your tags & the display text in your code, the text moves to the left margin (as it should), and won't move back again if you replace the spaces. This: <div align="center"> will move the whole block of text to the center of your page.

That's a start. Again, I would really recommend you do this page from scratch. Hand code it. There's really not much there, so it won't be hard. And in the long run, it will be much easier than trying to correct the mistakes made by Word, plus you will have learned how to do it the right way.

Keep us in the loop

[Kim L. Ground]

Thanks to your assistance, my website is fixed. I (finally) took your advice and wrote the two main pages from scratch in html. Even added an animated gif background to one page. And, for now I have filtered all of the other Word generated pages, which seems to make them work ok as well.
They were mostly text. (Still have to clean up some oddball fonts I used for headlines on a couple of subpages before I found out they were not printing properly on most people's screen, but that is minor stuff, and easily fixed when I get time.)

I posted some of what I have learned on a page on my site, as well as a link to this board at http://www.falconlabs.com/KLG/WEBSITE NOTES.htm.

THe only thing I still have an urgent motivation to learn is how to insert that special non printing character that makes long strings of spaces. For now, I cut and paste,and that works OK. Just bugs me that i don;t know how to make it consistently from the keyboard or how to find it consistently from the Character Map program in Windows. I guess it is an ASCII 20 or 'percent' 20.

Thanks again for all the assistance.
!! All Hail the Supreme Masters of the Web !! :D

[Kim L. Ground]

that site is http://falconlabs.com/KLG/WEBSITE%20NOTES.htm

(Now I know better than to use a space in a filename ...)

[DaveSW]

Sites you might possibly be interested in could include www.w3schools.com - pretty good tutorials. alternativley, www.webdevfaqs.com might be of assistance occasionallly.

I suggest you learn some css from w3schools - it will help you no end.

Anyone would think I was a moderator in the CSS section, recommending CSS lol!

[MotherNatrsSon]

Just another helpful hint. You might want to start getting used to using all lowercase. Your file names need to be lowercase as wel once you get into xhtml.

MNS