help with firefox and others

[martin coombes]

I have created a site which looks lovely on my computer and my wifes computer in IE. Yesterday I went to see a friend who is using firefox and I could hardly reconise my site. The site is,

www.thisisharz.com

I have spent the whole day on this and still none the wiser if anything more confused. can anyone help me, maybe some sort of magic code.

I feel like banging my head against a brick wall

Many thanks

Martin

[X96 Web Design]

First of all - NEVER USE IE. Only program in FF, then test and fix bugs in IE.

See this page (http://killie.mywebsight.ws) for more about IE...

Also, don't use Tables for layouts...

Cheers,
X96

[martin coombes]

I can understand the concerns about IE, and although I do not understand it, I can imagine it to be true. How do I start to rewtite for Firefox. I use an old free programme called "arachnophila" to write my programmes, is there a better product on the market, free would be nice. And do I need to relaearn everything again. Many thanks, Martin

[X96 Web Design]

No, much is the same, but good practice is to get to programming to the W3C, IE is the only browser that doesn't support the standards. Try getting your website to validate correctly (http://validator.w3.org), it'll help get your website up to specs.

I just use a plain-text editor to edit code, it's a Linux program called G-Edit. It has a lot of features I like, the best being syntax highlighting.

Hope this helps,
X96

[martin coombes]

What a day I had yesterday, decided to run my index page in w3.org and got back 356 errors. I started to work on them and slowly during the day reduced them to 113. Feeling proud of myself I decided to check how the page loaded up in Firefox. No change it was still the same all messy. Than I noticed that fire fox had a tool for error console, which showed a list of errors. So I went back changed the errors and reloaded the page. This time it was worse than before and the list of new errors doubled. Decided to retest in w3.org and my error list of 113 now jumped up to 249.
I have just a few questions that could help me,

1 <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
It tells me that I have not closed this, but it looks close to me. This is a message that reappears a lot.

2 <script language="javascript1.1"> <script language="javascript1.2">
This error message, "required attribute "type" not specified"
how do I fix this?

3 <hr width="95%" hr size="2" hr color="#000080" align="center">
It hates nearly all of this, puts up 4 errors, why?

I could go on as I have loads, but I dont want to take the micky. But one other point is if I have to work in small letters as opposed to capital letters, why does my programme write everything in Caps?

Many thanks

Martin

[X96 Web Design]

For the META tags, they need to be "closed" by a slash, like so:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

Here's some tags that need to be closed with the slash:
- BR <br/>
- HR <hr/>
- LINK <link rel="" href="" type="" />
- META <meta name/http-equiv="" content="" />
- IMG <img src="" alt="" />

For JavaScript blocks, you must define a type, you do not need language, it's optional. Example:

<script type="text/javascript">

I noticed you have the letters hr in your <hr> 3 times - that could contribute to that.

As for the caps, it's just the program... But that was deprecated a while ago, and now it will show up as and error. I'd recommend using a different program.

Hope this helps...

// X96 \\

[martin coombes]

Thank you so much for your help. Taking on board all that you said I got to work this morning, and I started out with 265 errors and I am now down to only 28, and 9 warnings. So doing good ( I wish I knew all of this before hand as I have over 80 other pages that I need to change).

Now that I am down to the last part and I feel this is the make or break part.

The first part seems strange,
<center>
<img src="this-is-harz-logo.gif" width="920" height="62" alt="" />
<hr width="95%" size="2" align="center" />
<img src="bannerhead.jpg" width="920" height="282" alt="" />
<hr width="95%" size="2" align="center" />
</center>

Here I have used the center tags to center the two images, if I remove them than the images will appear on the left. The error message states,
document type does not allow element "center" here; missing one of "object", "applet", "map", "iframe", "button", "ins", "del" start-tag

This is repeated for all the centre tags that I used and I am not sure why.

The next bunch of error messages are all related to the division tags that I have used, if you have time could you look at them and see if you spot something, I do believe that this is why the page looks all mess up.

The error page finishes with,

Line 327, Column 5: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: center line 85 and p
</p>

Line 328, Column 8: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: p line 60 and body
</body>

Line 329, Column 8: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: body line 59 and html
</html>

Line 329, Column 8: XML Parsing Error: Premature end of data in tag html line 2
</html>

I am guessing this is serious if the closing tags are wrong. Not sure why they are wrong.

I have one more issue but I will put that on a new section.

One more last question is if I ever get down to zero errors will it work on firefox ?

[martin coombes]

This is the last issue I have, the weather button. This was downloaded from another site with permission. It works well in IE.

<!-- ANFANG wetter.com-Button -->
<ahref="http://www.wetter.com/home/extern/ex_search.php?ms=1&ss=1&sss=2&search=38640" target="_blank">
<imgsrc="http://www.wetter.com/home/woys/woys.php?,C,1c,DEPLZ,38640,DEORT,Goslar" border="0" alt="" />
</a>
<!-- ENDE wetter.com-Button -->

This gives out 15 error and warning messages, most relate to the equal signs and the s / ss parts of the code. I do not even know how this works and as I copied and paste it into my web site I am scared of changing it.

Any ideas on this or should I leave alone

[X96 Web Design]

For the weather button, they have no space between the first two attributes, ahref="" should be a href="", same with the IMG (img src).

Yes, the Doctype doesn't allow the use of the CENTER tag. That's only for HTML, you're using xHTML. Simply exchange it for this:
CSS CODE:


.center { text-align:center; }

HTML CODE

<div class="center">
<img src="this-is-harz-logo.gif" width="920" height="62" alt="" />
<hr width="95%" size="2" align="center" />
<img src="bannerhead.jpg" width="920" height="282" alt="" />
<hr width="95%" size="2" align="center" />
</div>
.

For the "Parsing Error" messages, it means that you didn't end a tag that was started. For example, you may have a <P> tag, but no </p> tag to accompany it.

Depending on what wasn't working in Firefox, then some things will be fixed by zero errors... Though, mostly it's in the CSS more than it is in the HTML. Try running your CSS through the W3 CSS Validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/).

Cheers,
X96

[martin coombes]

Good news !!

It passed the test, after making some changes and lastly removing the weather, it finally worked. Only 86 pages to change, but I have learnt a lot.

Thank you so much for your time.

Keep an eye out for me on this forumn as I believe I will get some problems in changing the next lot of pages and beg for help again.

Many thanks,

Martin

[X96 Web Design]

You're very welcome, I was glad to help. :)

See you around!

// X96 \\