A Comedy of Errors
by Jerry A. Sierra and David Fiedler
There's a major snag with FrontPage 98 that affects how table elements are viewed in Netscape. It's not a Microsoft problem per se, either, but it's the result of a Netscape weakness clashing with a FrontPage "feature"...thus, a comedy of errors.
The Problem
A table cell, row or column with nothing in it but a background color, won't display that background color in Netscape, showing instead the body color. The pages, however, load as intended in Internet Explorer.
If you make the same page with FrontPage 97, the software inserts the spacer tag which basically tells the browser that there is something within the blank cell. FrontPage 98, however, removes this code (which was actually generated by FrontPage 97) as pages are updated and saved, so the background colors don't show in Netscape.
This is a major problem if you use rows or columns as a design element, or if you want to place an element in a precise spot.
The Discovery
As Jerry Sierra tells it:
"One rainy and windy evening a couple of weeks ago I sat in front of my new 17-inch monitor to update a small page I was doing for a local artist. The pages were originally created with FrontPage 97, which I've used for over a year without a browser-preference problem such as this one. I soon noticed that all the pages that were updated had lost an important design element: a black, background stripe.
I tried the page in MSIE, and the stripe was there.
The only real help came from Olson Banks at Netscape, who alerted me to the missing spacer tag within twenty-four hours. I added the tag in a text editor and the pages worked fine. However, FP98 removed the tag every time the file was saved.
Eventually I discovered that by inserting a paragraph tag between two spacer tags
<p>
in FP98's HTML editor, I could get the program to not delete the tags, and the table would display well in both Netscape and MSIE. This is what the whole cell tag looks like:
<td width="5%" bgcolor="#000000"> <p> </td>
- Go to Part 2 for more information and fixes.
- See the first demo page.
- See the second demo page.
Jerry A. Sierra is a free-lance writer and designer; you can find his home page here. David Fiedler is the Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com.
This article first appeared in March, 1998.
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