Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-06-04 Thread Gary Kline
On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 10:34:26PM -0600, Modulok wrote:
  looks like what i need NOW is a debugger, :-)   i have virtually
  zero design skills  except keep it simple
 
 To quote Albert Einstein, Everything should be made as simple as possible, 
 but
 not simpler.
 
 
 As far as editors and such, I personally write all of my code in a text 
 editor,
 regardless of the language. I have used hand-written code in a text editor to
 implement websites for multi-million dollar companies. Ironically enough, I'm 
 a
 visual effects artist.
 
 Anyway, I think I have likely gotten off topic myself and haven't contributed
 much to solving your original problem. Enough rambling out of me for now. Best
 of luck, Gary.
 
 -Modulok-


A day or two ago I  found a site that offers free templates. most
use javascript--which I can hack, or *discard*!--; all of these
will give me some ideas to change my www and other pages.  
And hold to my Keep-It-Simple philosophy.

I have virtually zero design talent, so tht forces to to rip off
other's creativity and mold it into something that works for me.

gary

PS:  I'll fess up; my present homepage was based on something I
 saw circa 1998 or '99.  


-- 
  Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org


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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-06-03 Thread Modulok
 looks like what i need NOW is a debugger, :-)   i have virtually
 zero design skills  except keep it simple

To quote Albert Einstein, Everything should be made as simple as possible, but
not simpler.

Much of the problem with the web today is the reliance on 'designers,' who are
primarily concerned with making things look pretty, rather than ensuring the
delivering of the underlying content. The latter of which far supersedes the
former in its importance.

To that end, the less reliance your page has on the client's environment,
something that is entirely beyond your control as a developer, the higher the
probability of successfully delivering the content. (Which should be your main
objective: If the content cannot be delivered, what was the bloody point?)
JavaScript, CSS, browser plugins,... despite modern trends, should be avoid
where possible. If they must be used, ensure that they do not compromise the
delivery of the content, in the event those mechanisms are un-available to the
client. For example, hyperlinks implemented solely in JavaScript is a sad state
of modern affairs.

The web is constantly evolving and may trends come and go, I can recall the days
where JavaScript was the hot new thing and everyone used it to do utterly
pointless things, like having snowflakes follow the pointer. Eventually it was
realized that this was pointless, annoying, and hampered the delivery of the
underlying content. Its usage faded out. Following this, was the rise of
websites built around the then Macromedia Flash. Flash was the new web, going to
replace conventional markup. This too was largely a commercial failure, as the
delivery of the content was impaired. Eventually, the long-forgotten JavaScript
had a resurgence with a new name and a few new friends (AJAX). Unfortunately,
it comes with all of the same old problems. Though solutions to many of these
problems exist, rarely are they used consistently and correctly. Additionally,
one must question if the added functionality is worth the reduction in the
probability of successful delivery.

Telling people to upgrade their browser, or enable certain features is a cop-out
which harkens back to the days of make your browser this wide, followed by a
horizontal rule.

As far as editors and such, I personally write all of my code in a text editor,
regardless of the language. I have used hand-written code in a text editor to
implement websites for multi-million dollar companies. Ironically enough, I'm a
visual effects artist.

Anyway, I think I have likely gotten off topic myself and haven't contributed
much to solving your original problem. Enough rambling out of me for now. Best
of luck, Gary.

-Modulok-
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RE: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-06-01 Thread Ted Mittelstaedt


 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Frank Shute
 Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 5:51 PM
 To: Ted Mittelstaedt
 Cc: Gary Kline; FreeBSD Mailing List
 Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
 
 
 On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 10:07:56PM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
 
  
  
   -Original Message-
   From: Gary Kline [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 3:14 PM
   To: Ted Mittelstaedt
   Cc: Kevin Downey; FreeBSD Mailing List
   Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
   
   
   
 Chill down a bit, okay?  first, (as the OP), i did not know
 thaat there was *this** great a disparity in thee rendering
 between classes of browsers.  i used to stick pretty close 
 to the w3.org (or whatever it was).   i didn't think the
 difference extended to how the TABLE stuff was parsed.
   
  
  Gary, the problem is that the majority of people out there use
  IE, most IE7, but still a lot of IE6, and a few deihards IE5.
  
  Then there are the older versions of Safari on the Mac - there's
  still a lot of Mac's around that are running 10.2 believe it or
  not, and those came with MS IE for the Mac which -really- munges
  some pages.  And Safari for Windows - which is a bit different than
  Safari on the Mac.
  
  And then there are all the Unix browsers.
  
  There are some test programs that can help.  But the validators
  can tell you your code is right and it still will display differently
  in some of the browsers.  The only way to do it is to do what
  the pros do - which is have all the different systems available
  and load their pages in those browsers.
 
 I test my pages with IE7, Safari on XP and Firefox on FreeBSD. Fixing
 problems with IE6 or anything else is too much to expect from amateur
 pages (which mine are).
 

IE6 is the last MS browser available for W2K and even though W2K
was out for only a short time, (compared to XP) unlike Win98, it is
a real 32 bit version of Windows, and there's still a lot of it
out there.

Although, after the US economic stimulus checks are received by
the general populace, I'm sure that will change somewhat.

(I was very tempted when I opened the Fry's Electronics advert
today and saw the Toshiba laptop, dual-core CPU, 1GB ram, 160GB disk with
a DVD burner, going for $449.99)

  
  Telling people my site is fine your browser is fucked, get a
  better one is the mark of an amateur who is also being extremely
  presumptive.  It's the old do it my way or fuck off
 
 You forget that Gary is an amateur. Hence, any complaints can be dealt
 with they validate, F off and get a better browser. (When he gets
 round to making them validate :)
 

:-)  He is an amateur - but his content isn't the sort of content
that is a must have to where people will actually go to the
trouble of loading a different browser to view it.

(Hint: this is why virtually all church services are free to attend)

  
  This is what Microsoft tells people - and most FreeBSDers and
  Linux people claim they are on the moral high ground because they
  aren't forcing their stuff down people's throats - that is, 
  until they create a webpage and then they have no problem forcing
  software down people's throats to see it, I guess
 
 I can't see anything wrong with telling people to use better software,
 you're doing them a favour! It's obviously different if you're writing
 pages for a commercial site.

I'm not sure I follow that...

 You should still write pages that
 validate and there are various hacks you can use with CSS, the DOM and
 Javscript to make your pages appear OK in older broken browsers...and
 newer ones with bugs.
 

But why do you need to do those if your telling people to get a
better browser... ;-)

Ted
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-31 Thread Gary Kline
On Sat, 2008-05-31 at 11:19 +0530, N. Raghavendra wrote:
 At 2008-05-30T21:28:58-07:00, Gary Kline wrote:
 
  Any guesses why things like this blowup::
 
!doctype html public -//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en 
 
 The quoted string above is the so-called Formal Public Identifier
 (FPI) of the DTD, i.e., the standard, that your HTML page claims to
 conform to.  However, the format of the FPI in your page is wrong.
 For instance, dtd should be the upper case DTD, and the ISO 639
 language code en should be the upper case EN.  In addition, the
 entire FPI is case-sensitive, so Transitional is different from
 transitional.  The recommended FPI for W3C HTML 4.0 Transitional is
 -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN.  So, the above line should
 read
 
   !doctype html public -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN 
 
 Better still, follow the normal practice of writing doctype and
 public in upper case, and eliminating unnecessary whitespace, and
 make it
 
   !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN
 
 At 2008-05-29T19:39:02-07:00, Gary Kline wrote:
 
  I still have unread messages down-queue, but may as well ask if
  there are any HTML/XML checkers in ports that would help validate my
  mark.
 
 See my message earlier in this thread, where I mentioned
 textproc/opensp, and how to use it.  In fact, the W3C validator is
 based on OpenSP, see http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#how
 
Thanks much.  This morning (or afternoon!) I'm replying using Evolution
that makes clicking on links easier.  There are a bunch of URL's I have
to study.

About the *only* place I use all caps is in my markup.  I didn't know
until now that the doctype//DOCTYPE tag **had** to be in caps.  I don't
see any rational for this exception, but am v glad to learn it!!

I have your earlier mail and will re-read as well as check out
textproc/opensp.   

gary

PS::  to the list: Late last night I used tidy and tidy -h, so now have 
   yet another tool in my bag:-)  ...If there atr any books or 
   websites on how to create a nice SIMPLE page, URL's please.
   (i Don't think design can be taught; that's like trying to 
   teach art, isn't it?)

--g


 Raghavendra.
 

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RE: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread Ted Mittelstaedt


 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of DAve
 Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 10:31 PM
 To: FreeBSD Mailing List
 Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
 
 
 Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
  
  -Original Message-
  From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Kline
  Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:51 PM
  To: Ted Mittelstaedt
  Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List
  Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
 
 
 you probably didn't start with the earlier markup.  back then,
 '93-4, there was BR,P, B, and EM.   i wrote a 2.2K-line 
 program to handle hi - ``hi'' and a couple other things.
 the code has evolved, of course, but still works.
 
  
  Not the case.  I use vi myself and I eschew background gifs and
  such.  Web pages that I create are black text on a white back
  ground interspersed with images when needed.  Period.  No CSS 
 no frames, no
  nothing.  If the content I put up isn't worth reading
  then no amount of formatting, font specification, animated
  images, and so forth is going to get people to look at it,
  is my feeling.
 
 I nearly spit coffee on my keyboard! I agree with you 100%. When we all 
 did HTML with BBedit and Textpad, people like Black, Tog, and Nielsen 
 kept everyone designing websites to best serve the content. Now it is 
 all about the sizzle, but there is rarely a steak.
 

Think about the generation we went to High School with.  This is
the generation that's signature movies were Risky Business, Fast
Times at Ridgemont High, etc.  Listening to Prince and Michael
Jackson.  Who's signature book was Madonna's SEX.  These are
the people who a decade later were buying SUV's and drinking
coffee out of a Folgers can, who voted in George Bush, and who
today are upside down on their ARM-financed homes.

These are the consumers of the websites on the Internet today.
No wonder most of the sites suck.

Ted
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread Bob Johnson
On 5/29/08, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 06:14:26PM -0400, Bob Johnson wrote:
 On 5/29/08, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
 was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
 [...]
 I'd be much obliged for any help here.
 
 

 Konqueror says that the comment that reads

 !-- click on Graphic to goto jottings.thought.org --!

[...]

   (also, this may explain why sometimes my comments bombbed during
   testing.  i thought ! .. ! was *legal*.  *mumble::censored*)


Yeah, that's a common error. It would make sense, and I have no clue
why comment tags aren't symmetric in HTML. But the bizzare thing is
that early in the days of web browsers, rather than just accept that
as legal so broken code would render correctly, the browser authors
decided to fix the problem by accepting end-of-line as a comment
terminator, which very distinctly violates the standard. So there are
a lot of web pages out there that won't render correctly on
standards-compliant browsers.

I suspect that using an editor that _correctly_ highlights HTML code
would solve most of your problems. To me, a content management system
only makes sense for a site that is either large, or has multiple
authors. If you update your site frequently, a WYSIWYG HTML editor
would be helpful and should have a very small learning curve. I think
others have already suggested a few.

I took a brief look at your site, and it appears that right now you
are pretty much using it as a blog. If the format works for you, a
site like  http://www.tumblr.com/help might be easier than maintaining
your own. The nice thing about tumblr is that you don't have to
install anything on your own system to use it.

- Bob
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread David Kelly
On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:52:31AM -0400, Bob Johnson wrote:
 
 I suspect that using an editor that _correctly_ highlights HTML code
 would solve most of your problems.

Yes, that is why I suggested tidy in addition to the other online
validators. If one's editor tool doesn't help, tidy is close at hand.
Can standardize the coding format. Can help fix errors. Can point out
errors.

 To me, a content management system only makes sense for a site that is
 either large, or has multiple authors. If you update your site
 frequently, a WYSIWYG HTML editor would be helpful and should have a
 very small learning curve. I think others have already suggested a
 few.

I really don't like the output of the WYSIWYG HTML editors I've seen. A
real text editor with HTML syntax parser for assistance is probably
best for anyone willing to read HTML.

I think CVS or Subversion /usr/ports/devel/subversion is among the best
content management systems available.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread Gary Kline
On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 01:31:01AM -0400, DAve wrote:
 Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
 
 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Kline
 Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:51 PM
 To: Ted Mittelstaedt
 Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List
 Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
 
 
 you probably didn't start with the earlier markup.  back then,
 '93-4, there was BR,P, B, and EM.   i wrote a 2.2K-line 
 program to handle hi - ``hi'' and a couple other things.
 the code has evolved, of course, but still works.
 
 
 Not the case.  I use vi myself and I eschew background gifs and
 such.  Web pages that I create are black text on a white back
 ground interspersed with images when needed.  Period.  No CSS no frames, no
 nothing.  If the content I put up isn't worth reading
 then no amount of formatting, font specification, animated
 images, and so forth is going to get people to look at it,
 is my feeling.
 
 I nearly spit coffee on my keyboard! I agree with you 100%. When we all 
 did HTML with BBedit and Textpad, people like Black, Tog, and Nielsen 
 kept everyone designing websites to best serve the content. Now it is 
 all about the sizzle, but there is rarely a steak.
 
 DAve


You got it, man.  At least 80% of the site I happen on--at least
that are selling something--have so much kerrapp going on I'd go
blind if I stayed there for very long.   (I so *enjoy* being able
to block ads or stop-movie (gnash), and then find the router or
DVD or whatever.  And get out!) 

This is not the kind of page i'M aiming for.   --But then, I
really don't know what/how I want to revise my www homepage.

The reason for the strange display was a bad comment.  So at
least I've learned something!   Now www looks fine from ffox, 
opera, and Konq. I've forbidden my tweenager from using IE so
have to wait for wife.  Or see if friends reply who use IE.

gary



 
 -- 
 In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years
 of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with
 rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel
 that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins.
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-- 
  Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org


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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread Kent
On Friday 30 May 2008 12:04:16 pm Gary Kline wrote:
 On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 01:31:01AM -0400, DAve wrote:
  Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
  -Original Message-
  From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Kline
 
  I nearly spit coffee on my keyboard! I agree with you 100%. When we all
  did HTML with BBedit and Textpad, people like Black, Tog, and Nielsen
  kept everyone designing websites to best serve the content. Now it is
  all about the sizzle, but there is rarely a steak.
 
  DAve

   You got it, man.  At least 80% of the site I happen on--at least
   that are selling something--have so much kerrapp going on I'd go
   blind if I stayed there for very long.   (I so *enjoy* being able
   to block ads or stop-movie (gnash), and then find the router or
   DVD or whatever.  And get out!)

I hate the over use of flash and etc. I sometimes think that is similar to 
putting a pdf file on a website instead of using txt. It bypasses some of the 
quirks and you see what they want you to see.


   This is not the kind of page i'M aiming for.   --But then, I
   really don't know what/how I want to revise my www homepage.

I use Adobe's GoLive but they killed it for Dreamweaver. If it had been a 
modest upgrade price, I would have upgraded but I didn't.


   The reason for the strange display was a bad comment.  So at
   least I've learned something!   Now www looks fine from ffox,
   opera, and Konq. I've forbidden my tweenager from using IE so
   have to wait for wife.  Or see if friends reply who use IE.


I have IE 7, Firefox, Seamonkey, and Safari on my main XP machine. I can't see 
any obvious difference. I also can't see any obvious difference between 
Firefox and Konqueror on FreeBSD and the XP browsers. 

FWIW, IE seems to complain on many of the sites I visit. It has a little 
comment on the status bar to the effect of completed but with errors. I 
didn't see it on your site.

Kent
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread Frank Shute
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 07:39:02PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:

 On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 11:05:36PM +0100, Frank Shute wrote:
  On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:05:22PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
  
 
   [[ ... ]]
 
  
   /* * strange:: the way that mutt queues [ and orders ] its
   replies and threads is * different from kmail.  I only use a GUI
   when there is a URL embedded, but * it must be down-queue.
     */ 
  
  Use textproc/urlview with mutt  Firefox.
 
 
   Frank, can you do me a favor and mail your ~/.urlview, please?
   I installed this program a few years ago, but it only worked 
   with lynx. I just found the url_handler.sh script so now have a
   clue but if your ~/.urlview points to firefox you'll save me
   some typing.   --Also [going further OT], I like Konsole even
   better than xterm.--

I'll post it here for the benefit of others:

$ cat ~/.urlview

COMMAND /usr/local/bin/firefox %s

I've also got:

macro index \cb |urlview\n  # simulate the old browse-url function

in my muttrc, so ctl-b gives me the list of the urls in the email.

 
  
   
  
   I would *rather* use vi and HTML-by-hand.   And produce very simple,
   readable,  uncluttered pages.  I don't use many graphics, e.g., I
   use the strength of HTML, php, blah ** 3.  
   
  
  
  Since you're a do it by hand person, I'll give you the benefit of my
  experiences doing my pages that way.
  
  My site is on a similar scale to yours and I've just kept it simple
  except where I've used server-side (PHP/Perl) and Javascript.
 
 
   Sounds like what I've done, more/less.  My index file in 
   www/data is PHP.  php keeps getting closer to C,  c; I've
   written a few things in php.
 
 
  
  1.
  
  Use Firefox to develop with and install the webdeveloper plug-in:
  
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
  
  Use vim not vi, since you get syntax highlighting with vim/gvim.
 
 
   Mm, I'm familiar with vim; like it all right, but lost my 
   ~/.vimrc file (and my backup).  NP in this case.  vim does 
   a solid job of highlighting.  

I'll mail you mine.

 
  
  Add x11/rgb to your system and:
  
  $ showrgb | less 
  
  will show you the websafe colours. Plug in the numbers to your
  stylesheet to get your preferred colours. You can view the colours
  with e.g:
  
  $ xterm -bg steelblue
  
  Or:
  
  http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp
 
 
   Have the rgb app; when I began building my jottings pages I knew
   the colors would set the philosophic/meditative mood, so in early
   '02 I ripped off the light blue from the philosophy pages at
   Lampeter.   Then used various color wheels to choose the other
   colors.  This is about the outer limits of my design
   capabilities, :-)
 
 
  
  I use Gimp for any graphics.
 
 
   Impressive.  Anything at the level of The GIMP is beyond me.

Hey, my knowledge of Gimp is strictly limited but they've got some
tutorials on the Gimp homesite.

 
  
  2.
  
  Choose a standard that you are going to code to and validate against.
  I use XHTML1.0 Transitional and CSS. Things are going more XML than
  HTML and transitional is less restrictive than strict.
  
 
   Here is where it may be best to take this offlist.  I'm guessing
   that XHTML is extended-HTML.  Yes/no?  = 10 years ago I
   created some short stories andor essays using the Sytle Sheets.
   But as you point out, XML is prob'ly the future of markup and I
   know next to nothing about it.  
 
   For example, given firstNameJohn/firstName, *where/what*
   defines the tag?  Since the WWW bunch has given XML the nod, it
   is both the present and future of a lot of the web.   ---So,
   are there any books for Beginners you recommend?  You or anyone
   else onlist who has waded thru this plea!

No books, I learnt all mine online.

 
 
  3.
  
  Have a look at w3c schools site to learn your chosen language:
  
  http://www.w3schools.com/
  
  There are various tutorials and references there. Best site on the
  'net!
  
 
   hMMM:-) Maybe I should've read ahead .
 
 
  4.
  
  Steal a simple page that validates:
  
  http://www.shute.org.uk/miscellany.html
  
  and use it as a template to hack on. Steal the style sheet too.
  
  Validate your webpage as you go along with the w3c validator.
 
   Should I just google for the validator?  At any rate, thanks much
   for the   two URL's above.  The more I can learn on my own
   (without bothering anyone else), the better.

I think there's a link to it on the w3c schools site I gave you. If
not, it's in the source of the page above. If you click on the valid
XHTML in that page, it will validate that page.

 
 
  
  5.
  
  A few tips:
  
  Use div's for layout, not tables.
 
 
   i cannot // hhaven't made sense of DIV since I first saw it.
   *This* may be where I've confused IE and Konq and it might be the
   easiest 

Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread Frank Shute
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 10:07:56PM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

 
 
  -Original Message-
  From: Gary Kline [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 3:14 PM
  To: Ted Mittelstaedt
  Cc: Kevin Downey; FreeBSD Mailing List
  Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
  
  
  
  Chill down a bit, okay?  first, (as the OP), i did not know
  thaat there was *this** great a disparity in thee rendering
  between classes of browsers.  i used to stick pretty close 
  to the w3.org (or whatever it was).   i didn't think the
  difference extended to how the TABLE stuff was parsed.
  
 
 Gary, the problem is that the majority of people out there use
 IE, most IE7, but still a lot of IE6, and a few deihards IE5.
 
 Then there are the older versions of Safari on the Mac - there's
 still a lot of Mac's around that are running 10.2 believe it or
 not, and those came with MS IE for the Mac which -really- munges
 some pages.  And Safari for Windows - which is a bit different than
 Safari on the Mac.
 
 And then there are all the Unix browsers.
 
 There are some test programs that can help.  But the validators
 can tell you your code is right and it still will display differently
 in some of the browsers.  The only way to do it is to do what
 the pros do - which is have all the different systems available
 and load their pages in those browsers.

I test my pages with IE7, Safari on XP and Firefox on FreeBSD. Fixing
problems with IE6 or anything else is too much to expect from amateur
pages (which mine are).

 
 Telling people my site is fine your browser is fucked, get a
 better one is the mark of an amateur who is also being extremely
 presumptive.  It's the old do it my way or fuck off

You forget that Gary is an amateur. Hence, any complaints can be dealt
with they validate, F off and get a better browser. (When he gets
round to making them validate :)

 
 This is what Microsoft tells people - and most FreeBSDers and
 Linux people claim they are on the moral high ground because they
 aren't forcing their stuff down people's throats - that is, 
 until they create a webpage and then they have no problem forcing
 software down people's throats to see it, I guess

I can't see anything wrong with telling people to use better software,
you're doing them a favour! It's obviously different if you're writing
pages for a commercial site. You should still write pages that
validate and there are various hacks you can use with CSS, the DOM and
Javscript to make your pages appear OK in older broken browsers...and
newer ones with bugs.

 
 Ted

Regards,

-- 

 Frank 


 Contact info: http://www.shute.org.uk/misc/contact.html 

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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread Gary Kline
On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 02:04:51PM -0700, Kent wrote:
 On Friday 30 May 2008 12:04:16 pm Gary Kline wrote:
  On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 01:31:01AM -0400, DAve wrote:
   Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
   -Original Message-
   From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Kline
  
   I nearly spit coffee on my keyboard! I agree with you 100%. When we all
   did HTML with BBedit and Textpad, people like Black, Tog, and Nielsen
   kept everyone designing websites to best serve the content. Now it is
   all about the sizzle, but there is rarely a steak.
  
   DAve
 
  You got it, man.  At least 80% of the site I happen on--at least
  that are selling something--have so much kerrapp going on I'd go
  blind if I stayed there for very long.   (I so *enjoy* being able
  to block ads or stop-movie (gnash), and then find the router or
  DVD or whatever.  And get out!)
 
 I hate the over use of flash and etc. I sometimes think that is similar to 
 putting a pdf file on a website instead of using txt. It bypasses some of the 
 quirks and you see what they want you to see.
 
 
  This is not the kind of page i'M aiming for.   --But then, I
  really don't know what/how I want to revise my www homepage.
 
 I use Adobe's GoLive but they killed it for Dreamweaver. If it had been a 
 modest upgrade price, I would have upgraded but I didn't.
 
 
  The reason for the strange display was a bad comment.  So at
  least I've learned something!   Now www looks fine from ffox,
  opera, and Konq. I've forbidden my tweenager from using IE so
  have to wait for wife.  Or see if friends reply who use IE.
 
 
 I have IE 7, Firefox, Seamonkey, and Safari on my main XP machine. I can't 
 see 
 any obvious difference. I also can't see any obvious difference between 
 Firefox and Konqueror on FreeBSD and the XP browsers. 
 
 FWIW, IE seems to complain on many of the sites I visit. It has a little 
 comment on the status bar to the effect of completed but with errors. I 
 didn't see it on your site.


Thw bad comment I was referring to was a markup comment:

!-- this is an HTML comment --

My blunder was

!-- this is an HTML comment --!

It wiped out a lot of stuff that firefox displayed correctly, 
possibly talking the EOL as the close-of-comment.  ...Sometimes I
wonder about myself!

gary



 
 Kent

-- 
  Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org


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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread Gary Kline
On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 09:49:50PM +0100, Frank Shute wrote:
 On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 07:39:02PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
 

Questions on validation
  
   4.
   
   Steal a simple page that validates:
   
   http://www.shute.org.uk/miscellany.html
   
   and use it as a template to hack on. Steal the style sheet too.
   
   Validate your webpage as you go along with the w3c validator.
  


When I typed in www.thought.org/x.html  AFTER having fixed 
the ! comment errors --, there were still 30 faults.
The one that really got me was TITLE because that one looked
100$ correct.  I deleted the META tags; no difference.  
(( x.html == index.php )).

I left the doctype on auto and the validator.w3.org couldn't
parse my -//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en markup. The err:
the Document Type (-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en) is not
in the validator's catalog  The index.php and index.html are 
identical except for the php entry.  

Any guesses why things like this blowup::


   !doctype html public -//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en 
HTML
HEAD
   TITLEThought Unlimited: www.thought.org/TITLE
/HEAD





  
   
   5.
   
   A few tips:
   
   Use div's for layout, not tables.
  
  
  i cannot // hhaven't made sense of DIV since I first saw it.
  *This* may be where I've confused IE and Konq and it might be the
  easiest way to create the layout that firefox gives me.
 
 div essentially gives you a box which after setting properties like
 font size, background color, margins, position etc. with your
 stylesheet you can place on your page and then fill with graphics,
 text etc.
 

And using the CSS, am I right??   I began using the style sheets
10, 10+ years ago.  Given that familiarity, it wouldn't be that 
much of a jump to go back to that mode.  ( Besides, TABLE's 
can be a serious PITA:)

I used the website's tidy tool so I saw what I had to do in order
to transition. I'll need to study the DIV stuff.  The important
thing is that late this afternoon I learned that this stuff is
rendered even under IE ...  


 Have a look at the source and style sheet of my contact page (at the
 bottom of this mail) to see how you can use them quite simply.
 

[[ ... ]]

  
  I didn't understand you could hardwire a textsize; maybe I've
  done it inadvertently ... 
 
 Yeah, you can:
 
 font-size: 16px
 
 Use something like (in your style sheet):
 
 font: italic 120% sans-serif;
 
 where the 120% sets the size of the font relative to the browsers
 setting.
 
 Say me default font is set to 20px in my browser, then in the former
 case the font will render at 16px and in the latter case at 22px.
 
 I don't know if it's something you did with your pages but it's
 something you should be aware of.
 

Wel, I set FONT SIZE=3 and elsewhere FONT SIZE=+2
Probably the same, come to think of it.


  
  
  
   
   Keep an eye out for pages that look nice and validate. View source 
   then steal chunks of xhtml and css. 
   
 
me thinks it's going to be a busy 2, 3 weeks, :)

gary

 

-- 
  Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org


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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-30 Thread N. Raghavendra
At 2008-05-30T21:28:58-07:00, Gary Kline wrote:

 Any guesses why things like this blowup::

   !doctype html public -//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en 

The quoted string above is the so-called Formal Public Identifier
(FPI) of the DTD, i.e., the standard, that your HTML page claims to
conform to.  However, the format of the FPI in your page is wrong.
For instance, dtd should be the upper case DTD, and the ISO 639
language code en should be the upper case EN.  In addition, the
entire FPI is case-sensitive, so Transitional is different from
transitional.  The recommended FPI for W3C HTML 4.0 Transitional is
-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN.  So, the above line should
read

  !doctype html public -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN 

Better still, follow the normal practice of writing doctype and
public in upper case, and eliminating unnecessary whitespace, and
make it

  !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN

At 2008-05-29T19:39:02-07:00, Gary Kline wrote:

 I still have unread messages down-queue, but may as well ask if
 there are any HTML/XML checkers in ports that would help validate my
 mark.

See my message earlier in this thread, where I mentioned
textproc/opensp, and how to use it.  In fact, the W3C validator is
based on OpenSP, see http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#how

Raghavendra.

-- 
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Harish-Chandra Research Institute   | http://www.mri.ernet.in/
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RE: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Ted Mittelstaedt

Don't bother, Gary.

  The world is moving towards CMS systems for hosting websites.

  The ultra-cheapo people use godaddy's site builder and
put crap on a crappy-looking interface.

  The better hosting companies each have their own site builders
and look better, and are populated by acres of garden-variety corporate
and the occassional personal sites.

  Very, very few people custom-write sites in HTML anymore.
Most people use sitebuilding software (frontpage was the original,
it's deprecated now in favor of other newer tools) either running
on their PC or on the server.

  black text on blue is terribly hard to read for most people,
read up on how the human eye works to understand why.

  Put your time into loading a CMS system on your server then
create your site in it.  Yes the learning curve is steep in
the beginning but it's not rote memorization of HTML tags.  It
is understanding how all the things work together.

Ted

 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Kline
 Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 11:58 PM
 To: FreeBSD Mailing List
 Subject: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
 
 
   Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page 
   was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
   on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
   firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
   '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
   mozilla, firefox, a couple others.
 
   About a week ago I viewed my homepage with KDE Konq and almost
   flipped out.  One free commercial historical calender event 
   feature was glued to the bottom of my blue bar (TABLE/TABLE)
   on the RHS of the page.   And yep, the new text and other things 
   were centered in the middle of the long blue rectangle.
 
   Since I have a few weeks now to work on things beside research,
   it's time to update my main web page.   My friend was using IE;
   it may be that Konqueror uses a similar parser to position
   things on a .php or .html page.  
 
   Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
   what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
   other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
   learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for
   my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
   editors in ports?
 
   I'd be much obliged for any help here.
 
 
   gary
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -- 
   Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
 http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org
 
 
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Kevin Downey
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:30 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Don't bother, Gary.

  The world is moving towards CMS systems for hosting websites.

  The ultra-cheapo people use godaddy's site builder and
 put crap on a crappy-looking interface.

  The better hosting companies each have their own site builders
 and look better, and are populated by acres of garden-variety corporate
 and the occassional personal sites.

  Very, very few people custom-write sites in HTML anymore.
 Most people use sitebuilding software (frontpage was the original,
 it's deprecated now in favor of other newer tools) either running
 on their PC or on the server.

  black text on blue is terribly hard to read for most people,
 read up on how the human eye works to understand why.

  Put your time into loading a CMS system on your server then
 create your site in it.  Yes the learning curve is steep in
 the beginning but it's not rote memorization of HTML tags.  It
 is understanding how all the things work together.

 Ted

 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Kline
 Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 11:58 PM
 To: FreeBSD Mailing List
 Subject: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.


   Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
   was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
   on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
   firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
   '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
   mozilla, firefox, a couple others.

   About a week ago I viewed my homepage with KDE Konq and almost
   flipped out.  One free commercial historical calender event
   feature was glued to the bottom of my blue bar (TABLE/TABLE)
   on the RHS of the page.   And yep, the new text and other things
   were centered in the middle of the long blue rectangle.

   Since I have a few weeks now to work on things beside research,
   it's time to update my main web page.   My friend was using IE;
   it may be that Konqueror uses a similar parser to position
   things on a .php or .html page.

   Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
   what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
   other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
   learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for
   my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
   editors in ports?

   I'd be much obliged for any help here.


   gary






 --
   Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
 http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org



Let be the first of many to say, please do not top post.
In a recent interview it was revealed that the New York Times does a
lot of by hand html writing because it just gets you better html.
Konq uses more or less the same rendering engine as Safari.

http://iamvoodoochile.redgrapellc.com/uploaded_images/1985-741912.jpg
-- break down of modern webdesign

-- 
The Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of
personal relationships.
 Fisheye
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Christian Zachariasen
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
'94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
mozilla, firefox, a couple others.

About a week ago I viewed my homepage with KDE Konq and almost
flipped out.  One free commercial historical calender event
feature was glued to the bottom of my blue bar (TABLE/TABLE)
on the RHS of the page.   And yep, the new text and other things
were centered in the middle of the long blue rectangle.

Since I have a few weeks now to work on things beside research,
it's time to update my main web page.   My friend was using IE;
it may be that Konqueror uses a similar parser to position
things on a .php or .html page.

Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for
my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
editors in ports?

I'd be much obliged for any help here.


gary






 --
  Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org


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I say keep using the technique you're using now. That's what I'd do. Instead
of finding a HTML Editor
just find a simple text editor and write all your HTML in a clean manner.

I don't know where Ted got his statistics from, but most people I know use
simple text editors for writing their HTML, CSS
and JavaScript. Personally I stick to vi or diakonos on BSD and Notepad2 on
Windows.

Christian Zachariasen
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Matthew Seaman
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: RIPEMD160

Gary Kline wrote:

   Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
   what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
   other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
   learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for
   my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
   editors in ports?


It's  bit OT really. But wotthehell, wotthehell.  I've found the best approach
is to make liberal use of http://validator.w3.org/ -- if your HTML validates
correctly according to which ever standard you apply, and similarly if your CSS
validates correctly as CSS 2.0 then you should get a pretty similar result in
virtually all browsers.  Use HTML Tidy  (ports: www/tidy-devel) to clean up your
HTML automatically, and strongly prefer CSS over in-line formatting as tidy 
steers
you towards.

One thing to watch out for though is an important difference between the XHTML 
1.0
standard and the HTML 4.01 standard (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/) XHTML 1.0 is an 
XML
language and should be served using the 'application/xml+xhtml' MIME type, 
unlike
HTML 4.01 which should be served as 'text/html' 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/NOTE-xhtml-media-types-20020801/)

I've found that this can make quite a difference to the way a page is rendered
in FireFox.  The HTML 4.01 standard is probably your best bet for maximum
interoperability with all sorts of different desktop browsers, whereas XHTML is 
better
if you need access by stuff like Mobile Phones or text-to-speech systems for the
blind.

Cheers,

Matthew

- -- 
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  7 Priory Courtyard
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate
  Kent, CT11 9PW, UK
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread N. Raghavendra
At 2008-05-28T23:57:35-07:00, Gary Kline wrote:

 Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly what
 causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any other
 ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the learning
 curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for my home
 page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML editors in
 ports?

My suggestion would be to just write HTML which conforms to a
standard.  For instance, the main page at your Web site
`www.thought.org' declares its DOCTYPE as W3C HTML 4.01 Transitional,
but validating it at http://validator.w3.org/ against that standard
produces several errors.  If all those errors are fixed, your pages
will be rendered properly by all browsers that support these
standards, see, e.g.,

  http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/abdesign3.html
  http://browsehappy.com/browsers/

As for editors, I suggest Emacs with PSGML mode (editors/psgml).
Rather than depending on the validator at W3C, you can install
textproc/opensp, and use onsgmls(1) to validate your HTML documents
without traversing the Internet, with something like

  onsgmls -c ~/catalog -egsu foo.html

HTH,
Raghavendra.

-- 
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Harish-Chandra Research Institute   | http://www.mri.ernet.in/
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RE: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Ted Mittelstaedt


 -Original Message-
 From: Kevin Downey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
 Let be the first of many to say, please do not top post.

Let me be the first to say please don't quote the entire posting
and the entire response.

 In a recent interview it was revealed that the New York Times does a
 lot of by hand html writing because it just gets you better html.

Of course it does.  And I would expect a really professional
site to do so.  But, your not paying attention to what he is
saying:

... trying to determine exactly what causes firefox and konq to diverge...

An html author who writes by hand MUST know about ALL browser 
idiosyncracies.  The OP does not want to know this or he would
have TESTED with all browsers years ago.  And the context indicates
he really doesen't want to know.

...I've never learned an HTML editors because of the learning curve...

Have you visited this guy's website and actually READ it?  This
isn't a stupid person here.  Anyone who gets an engineering degree
is perfectly capabably of surmounting the learning curve.  He
DOESEN'T WANT TO DO IT.

His website IS NOT the usual techie website full of instructions
on how to write better html, use this, that and so on.  He's simply
not interested in that - at least, not enough to actually want to
spend any time learning an HTML editor.

He doesen't WANT to surmount the learning curve, it is NOT that
he CAN'T DO IT.

What he wants is a shortcut, a means to QUICKLY get what he
has to say online, with minimal work, that will look OK in
all browsers.  He doesen't want the world's greatest website.
He just wants it good enough so that people will read his
philosophy, which is what he is really interested in.  Not
all this html stuff.

This comprises the VAST MAJORITY of all people posting stuff to
the web.  Of course, most of them are using template sites,
or myspace, or facebook, or whatever.  You might think a facebook
user isn't a web designer, but she thinks she is.  She is doing
the same thing a web designer does - put her information onto
the web so other people can read it.  And she is using a CMS
that takes care of all the icky details of making her stuff
look the same across all browsers.

Ted

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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread David Kelly
On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 11:57:35PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
   Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page 
   was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
   on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
   firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
   '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
   mozilla, firefox, a couple others.

Others have suggested online validators. /usr/ports/www/tidy is another
that can check your code, even attempt repairs. Can also be used to
standardize the coding format much like GNU indent for C code. Comes
built-in to BBEdit on Mac where I do most of my HTML authoring.

Eyeballing your code the first thing that stood out was:

BACKGROUND=/usr/local/www/data/Graphics/paper0.jpg

Don't think that will work for anyone other than yourself, and only when
you are on the server itself. Unless one has a file with that exact same
name and path.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Gary Kline
On Thu May 29 2008 00:39:06 Christian Zachariasen wrote:
 On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
 was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
 on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
 firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
 '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
 mozilla, firefox, a couple others.
 
 About a week ago I viewed my homepage with KDE Konq and almost
 flipped out.  One free commercial historical calender event
 feature was glued to the bottom of my blue bar (TABLE/TABLE)
 on the RHS of the page.   And yep, the new text and other things
 were centered in the middle of the long blue rectangle.
 
 Since I have a few weeks now to work on things beside research,
 it's time to update my main web page.   My friend was using IE;
 it may be that Konqueror uses a similar parser to position
 things on a .php or .html page.
 
 Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
 what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
 other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
 learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for
 my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
 editors in ports?
 
 I'd be much obliged for any help here.
 
 
 gary
 
 
 
 
 
 
  --
   Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
 http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org
 
 
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 I say keep using the technique you're using now. That's what I'd do.
 Instead of finding a HTML Editor
 just find a simple text editor and write all your HTML in a clean manner.

 I don't know where Ted got his statistics from, but most people I know use
 simple text editors for writing their HTML, CSS
 and JavaScript. Personally I stick to vi or diakonos on BSD and Notepad2 on
 Windows.

/*
 * strange:: the way that mutt queues [ and orders ] its replies and theads is 
 * different from kmail.  I only use a GUI when there is a URL embedded, but
 * it must be down-queue.   
 */

I would *rather* use vi and HTML-by-hand.   And produce very simple, readable,  
uncluttered pages.  I don't use many graphics, e.g., I use the strength of 
HTML, php, blah ** 3.  

I'm ready to learn this CMS that Ted mentioned if I knew what it was!  And 
if its in ports.   AFAIK, the only pages that look bizarre are my 
initial www (and one other based on it).   I'll google around to find out 
what CMS is...   

 Christian Zachariasen
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Jerry McAllister
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:05:22PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:

 On Thu May 29 2008 00:39:06 Christian Zachariasen wrote:
  On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
  was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
  on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
  firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
  '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
  mozilla, firefox, a couple others.
  
  About a week ago I viewed my homepage with KDE Konq and almost
  flipped out.  One free commercial historical calender event
  feature was glued to the bottom of my blue bar (TABLE/TABLE)
  on the RHS of the page.   And yep, the new text and other things
  were centered in the middle of the long blue rectangle.
  
  Since I have a few weeks now to work on things beside research,
  it's time to update my main web page.   My friend was using IE;
  it may be that Konqueror uses a similar parser to position
  things on a .php or .html page.
  
  Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
  what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
  other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
  learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for
  my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
  editors in ports?
  
  I'd be much obliged for any help here.
  
  gary
  
   --
Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
  http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org
  
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  I say keep using the technique you're using now. That's what I'd do.
  Instead of finding a HTML Editor
  just find a simple text editor and write all your HTML in a clean manner.
 
  I don't know where Ted got his statistics from, but most people I know use
  simple text editors for writing their HTML, CSS
  and JavaScript. Personally I stick to vi or diakonos on BSD and Notepad2 on
  Windows.
 
 /*
  * strange:: the way that mutt queues [ and orders ] its replies and theads 
 is 
  * different from kmail.  I only use a GUI when there is a URL embedded, but
  * it must be down-queue.   
  */
 
 I would *rather* use vi and HTML-by-hand.   And produce very simple, 
 readable,  
 uncluttered pages.  I don't use many graphics, e.g., I use the strength of 
 HTML, php, blah ** 3.  
 
 I'm ready to learn this CMS that Ted mentioned if I knew what it was!  And 
 if its in ports.   AFAIK, the only pages that look bizarre are my 
 initial www (and one other based on it).   I'll google around to find out 
 what CMS is...   

We are initial buried.   CMS can mean many things, but in this
case it probably mean either Content Management System or 
possibly Change Management System.   Both are common uses.

If you are happy editing your HTML files and doing your own CSS,
then you don't need it at all.

That web verification site might be an interesting thing to
try now and then, though.
jerry


 
  Christian Zachariasen
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread DAve

Gary Kline wrote:

On Thu May 29 2008 00:39:06 Christian Zachariasen wrote:

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

   Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
   was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
   on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
   firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
   '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
   mozilla, firefox, a couple others.

   About a week ago I viewed my homepage with KDE Konq and almost
   flipped out.  One free commercial historical calender event
   feature was glued to the bottom of my blue bar (TABLE/TABLE)
   on the RHS of the page.   And yep, the new text and other things
   were centered in the middle of the long blue rectangle.

   Since I have a few weeks now to work on things beside research,
   it's time to update my main web page.   My friend was using IE;
   it may be that Konqueror uses a similar parser to position
   things on a .php or .html page.

   Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
   what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
   other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
   learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for
   my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
   editors in ports?

   I'd be much obliged for any help here.


I say keep using the technique you're using now. That's what I'd do.
Instead of finding a HTML Editor
just find a simple text editor and write all your HTML in a clean manner.

I don't know where Ted got his statistics from, but most people I know use
simple text editors for writing their HTML, CSS
and JavaScript. Personally I stick to vi or diakonos on BSD and Notepad2 on
Windows.


/*
 * strange:: the way that mutt queues [ and orders ] its replies and theads is 
 * different from kmail.  I only use a GUI when there is a URL embedded, but

 * it must be down-queue.   
 */

I would *rather* use vi and HTML-by-hand.   And produce very simple, readable,  
uncluttered pages.  I don't use many graphics, e.g., I use the strength of 
HTML, php, blah ** 3.  

I'm ready to learn this CMS that Ted mentioned if I knew what it was!  And 
if its in ports.   AFAIK, the only pages that look bizarre are my 
initial www (and one other based on it).   I'll google around to find out 
what CMS is...   


I still prefer html by hand. I use VIM though all our designers and 
developers use Dreamweaver, funny few if any can fix the HTML if the 
tool munges it. Many have no idea how HTML works.


As far as CMS tools go some create nice pages but at a cost. We have 
several clients who insist on CMS tools. The joke around our Office is 
[Joomla|Rails|other] is the only tool known to man to require 1GB server 
memory to load all the required libs in displaying Hello World. Some 
of the CMS tools are very very heavy. Straight static HTML can be 
blisteringly fast in comparison unless you have low traffic or a fairly 
hefty server. Static HTML also doesn't show up in my CERT emails every 
month with security issues.


My 2 cents worth...

DAve

--
In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years
of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with
rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel
that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins.
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Gary Kline
On Thu May 29 2008 08:46:29 David Kelly wrote:
 On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 11:57:35PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
  Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
  was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
  on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
  firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
  '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
  mozilla, firefox, a couple others.

 Others have suggested online validators. /usr/ports/www/tidy is another
 that can check your code, even attempt repairs. Can also be used to
 standardize the coding format much like GNU indent for C code. Comes
 built-in to BBEdit on Mac where I do most of my HTML authoring.

 Eyeballing your code the first thing that stood out was:

 BACKGROUND=/usr/local/www/data/Graphics/paper0.jpg

 Don't think that will work for anyone other than yourself, and only when
 you are on the server itself. Unless one has a file with that exact same
 name and path.

Good one, thankee.  Using the bg graphic works on my jottings pages because I 
gave a relative ./Graphics/foo.jpg pointer.  Just checking now with Opera, 
I still see the www page askew.  Blue-bar with most strings embedded within 
it.  firefox [ and mozilla ] get it the way I want, opera and konq, nope.

tidy?  Sorry, must snce i've been wworking on other things, i've lost touch.




-- 
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http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Gary Kline
On Thu May 29 2008 13:26:43 DAve wrote:
 Gary Kline wrote:
  On Thu May 29 2008 00:39:06 Christian Zachariasen wrote:
  On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
 was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
 on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
 firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
 '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
 mozilla, firefox, a couple others.
 
 About a week ago I viewed my homepage with KDE Konq and almost
 flipped out.  One free commercial historical calender event
 feature was glued to the bottom of my blue bar (TABLE/TABLE)
 on the RHS of the page.   And yep, the new text and other things
 were centered in the middle of the long blue rectangle.
 
 Since I have a few weeks now to work on things beside research,
 it's time to update my main web page.   My friend was using IE;
 it may be that Konqueror uses a similar parser to position
 things on a .php or .html page.
 
 Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
 what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
 other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
 learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design
  for my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
  editors in ports?
 
 I'd be much obliged for any help here.
 
  I say keep using the technique you're using now. That's what I'd do.
  Instead of finding a HTML Editor
  just find a simple text editor and write all your HTML in a clean
  manner.
 
  I don't know where Ted got his statistics from, but most people I know
  use simple text editors for writing their HTML, CSS
  and JavaScript. Personally I stick to vi or diakonos on BSD and Notepad2
  on Windows.
 
  /*
   * strange:: the way that mutt queues [ and orders ] its replies and
  theads is * different from kmail.  I only use a GUI when there is a URL
  embedded, but * it must be down-queue.   
   */
 
  I would *rather* use vi and HTML-by-hand.   And produce very simple,
  readable, uncluttered pages.  I don't use many graphics, e.g., I use the
  strength of HTML, php, blah ** 3.
 
  I'm ready to learn this CMS that Ted mentioned if I knew what it was! 
  And if its in ports.   AFAIK, the only pages that look bizarre are my
  initial www (and one other based on it).   I'll google around to find
  out what CMS is...

 I still prefer html by hand. I use VIM though all our designers and
 developers use Dreamweaver, funny few if any can fix the HTML if the
 tool munges it. Many have no idea how HTML works.

 As far as CMS tools go some create nice pages but at a cost. We have
 several clients who insist on CMS tools. The joke around our Office is
 [Joomla|Rails|other] is the only tool known to man to require 1GB server
 memory to load all the required libs in displaying Hello World. Some
 of the CMS tools are very very heavy. Straight static HTML can be
 blisteringly fast in comparison unless you have low traffic or a fairly
 hefty server. Static HTML also doesn't show up in my CERT emails every
 month with security issues.

 My 2 cents worth...

well, for years my favored method is kiss == keep it simple, sir.
i'm still chiuckling over that tool that requires a GIG to load.  


gary

ps: thanks to Google: CMS == content mgnt system




 DAve



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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Jerry McAllister
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:52:22PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:

 On Thu May 29 2008 13:26:43 DAve wrote:

 ...

  memory to load all the required libs in displaying Hello World. Some
  of the CMS tools are very very heavy. Straight static HTML can be
  blisteringly fast in comparison unless you have low traffic or a fairly
  hefty server. Static HTML also doesn't show up in my CERT emails every
  month with security issues.
 
  My 2 cents worth...
 
 well, for years my favored method is kiss == keep it simple, sir.

Oh, you are polite.   I am used to other interpretations
for that second 's' ...

 i'm still chiuckling over that tool that requires a GIG to load.  
 
 gary
 
 ps: thanks to Google: CMS == content mgnt system
 

Yup.That is one of the more common.

jerry

 
 
 
  DAve
 
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Gary Kline


FWIW, I'Ve switch back to mutt.  i can't live without vi


On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:30:05AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
 
 Don't bother, Gary.
 
   The world is moving towards CMS systems for hosting websites.

do we have such a mngnmt system tool in ports??



 
   The ultra-cheapo people use godaddy's site builder and
 put crap on a crappy-looking interface.


HMmmm.   it's ben my experience that if you keep a page 
*simple*,  that serves best.   now i'm not talking about 
Sam's New and Used Dildos and Computers that's got animations 
screaming at you.   With 50 text and graphic ads/page plus 
flashing text.  i'm talking about something more together.
low-impact AND inventive.   i've learned that if the 
content sux, all the bells and whistles won't help.  


 
   The better hosting companies each have their own site builders
 and look better, and are populated by acres of garden-variety corporate
 and the occassional personal sites.
 
   Very, very few people custom-write sites in HTML anymore.
 Most people use sitebuilding software (frontpage was the original,
 it's deprecated now in favor of other newer tools) either running
 on their PC or on the server.
 
   black text on blue is terribly hard to read for most people,
 read up on how the human eye works to understand why.


the why is simple, reduced contrast; that's why i have black text
on a white bg.  Or so i thought until i saw how konquorer 
(and opera) were munging my homepage.   

firefox displays a graphic [link] with a stylized J; it is not 
displayed by the other 2.  that might be where to start looking.






 
   Put your time into loading a CMS system on your server then
 create your site in it.  Yes the learning curve is steep in
 the beginning but it's not rote memorization of HTML tags.  It
 is understanding how all the things work together.


you probably didn't start with the earlier markup.  back then,
'93-4, there was BR,P, B, and EM.   i wrote a 2.2K-line 
program to handle hi - ``hi'' and a couple other things.
the code has evolved, of course, but still works.

looks like what i need NOW is a debugger, :-)   i have virtually
zero design skills  except keep it simple

gary


 
 Ted
 
[[ save the electrons ]]

  

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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Gary Kline
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:38:05AM -0700, Kevin Downey wrote:
 On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:30 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


[[ ... ]]

 Konq uses more or less the same rendering engine as Safari.


interesting. where is this browser in ports.  locate doesnt 
find it. 

tx for the datapoint.


 
 http://iamvoodoochile.redgrapellc.com/uploaded_images/1985-741912.jpg
 -- break down of modern webdesign
 
 -- 
 The Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of
 personal relationships.
  Fisheye

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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Frank Shute
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:05:22PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:

 On Thu May 29 2008 00:39:06 Christian Zachariasen wrote:
 
  On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  
  Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
  was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
  on the deep-blue bg on my RHS.  I stopped and checked with
  firefox; things looked fine.  I've done all markup by hand since
  '94, very carefully, with only browsers in the ports tree--
  mozilla, firefox, a couple others.
  
  About a week ago I viewed my homepage with KDE Konq and almost
  flipped out.  One free commercial historical calender event
  feature was glued to the bottom of my blue bar (TABLE/TABLE)
  on the RHS of the page.   And yep, the new text and other things
  were centered in the middle of the long blue rectangle.
  
  Since I have a few weeks now to work on things beside research,
  it's time to update my main web page.   My friend was using IE;
  it may be that Konqueror uses a similar parser to position
  things on a .php or .html page.
  
  Other than beginning from Zero and trying to determine exactly
  what causes firefox and konq to diverge, do any of you have any
  other ideas?  I've never learned an HTML editors because of the
  learning curve.  But:: if/when I come up with a better design for
  my home page, I'm willing to try again:: any best (simple) HTML
  editors in ports?
  
  I'd be much obliged for any help here.
  
  
 
  I say keep using the technique you're using now. That's what I'd
  do.  Instead of finding a HTML Editor just find a simple text
  editor and write all your HTML in a clean manner.
 
  I don't know where Ted got his statistics from, but most people I
  know use simple text editors for writing their HTML, CSS and
  JavaScript. Personally I stick to vi or diakonos on BSD and
  Notepad2 on Windows.
  

 /*
  * strange:: the way that mutt queues [ and orders ] its replies and theads 
 is 
  * different from kmail.  I only use a GUI when there is a URL embedded, but
  * it must be down-queue.   
  */

Use textproc/urlview with mutt  Firefox.

 

 I would *rather* use vi and HTML-by-hand.   And produce very simple,
 readable,  uncluttered pages.  I don't use many graphics, e.g., I
 use the strength of HTML, php, blah ** 3.  
 
 I'm ready to learn this CMS that Ted mentioned if I knew what it
 was!  And if its in ports.   AFAIK, the only pages that look bizarre
 are my initial www (and one other based on it).   I'll google
 around to find out what CMS is...


Since you're a do it by hand person, I'll give you the benefit of my
experiences doing my pages that way.

My site is on a similar scale to yours and I've just kept it simple
except where I've used server-side (PHP/Perl) and Javascript.

1.

Use Firefox to develop with and install the webdeveloper plug-in:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Use vim not vi, since you get syntax highlighting with vim/gvim.

Add x11/rgb to your system and:

$ showrgb | less 

will show you the websafe colours. Plug in the numbers to your
stylesheet to get your preferred colours. You can view the colours
with e.g:

$ xterm -bg steelblue

Or:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp

I use Gimp for any graphics.

2.

Choose a standard that you are going to code to and validate against.
I use XHTML1.0 Transitional and CSS. Things are going more XML than
HTML and transitional is less restrictive than strict.

3.

Have a look at w3c schools site to learn your chosen language:

http://www.w3schools.com/

There are various tutorials and references there. Best site on the
'net!

4.

Steal a simple page that validates:

http://www.shute.org.uk/miscellany.html

and use it as a template to hack on. Steal the style sheet too.

Validate your webpage as you go along with the w3c validator.

5.

A few tips:

Use div's for layout, not tables.

Don't use fixed text heights, use relative so it respects the users
preferences for text size.

Keep an eye out for pages that look nice and validate. View source 
then steal chunks of xhtml and css. 

6.

Happy hacking!


You'll find that your validated pages will show fine in most modern
browsers although some have more quirks than others. But when you get
somebody say Your webpage doesn't look right in Internet Exploder 5
you can say to them Get a proper browser that respects web
standards!

Regards,


-- 

 Frank 


 Contact info: http://www.shute.org.uk/misc/contact.html 

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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Gary Kline
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 05:00:57AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
 
 
  -Original Message-
  From: Kevin Downey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  
  Let be the first of many to say, please do not top post.
 
 Let me be the first to say please don't quote the entire posting
 and the entire response.
 
  In a recent interview it was revealed that the New York Times does a
  lot of by hand html writing because it just gets you better html.
 
 Of course it does.  And I would expect a really professional
 site to do so.  But, your not paying attention to what he is
 saying:
 
 ... trying to determine exactly what causes firefox and konq to diverge...
 
 An html author who writes by hand MUST know about ALL browser 
 idiosyncracies.  The OP does not want to know this or he would
 have TESTED with all browsers years ago.  And the context indicates
 he really doesen't want to know.



Chill down a bit, okay?  first, (as the OP), i did not know
thaat there was *this** great a disparity in thee rendering
between classes of browsers.  i used to stick pretty close 
to the w3.org (or whatever it was).   i didn't think the
difference extended to how the TABLE stuff was parsed.

BZZZT.  letsee, that 25 trillion for Life, 3 for gary.

.

 

--the OP


-- 
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Bob Johnson
On 5/29/08, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
   Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
   was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
[...]
   I'd be much obliged for any help here.



Konqueror says that the comment that reads

!-- click on Graphic to goto jottings.thought.org --!

isn't closed until the end of the next comment way down the page, so
it is ignoring all the code in between. I think that's your problem
(there is a typo in the close of the comment). In other words,
Konqueror seems to be displaying the page correctly. The other
browsers are probably (incorrectly) treating end-of-line as
end-of-comment.

When you View Document Source in Konqueror, it highlights the markup
to make it easier to spot such problems, and comments stand out pretty
distinctly. In fact, it appears there are a few other places with that
same typo (closing a comment with --!).

- Bob
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread cpghost
On Thu, 29 May 2008 14:50:53 -0700
Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

The world is moving towards CMS systems for hosting websites.
 
   do we have such a mngnmt system tool in ports??

How about Plone or other Zope-based apps? Plone is in ports:
  /usr/ports/www/plone3
as is Silva:
  /usr/ports/www/zope-silva

But be forewarned: both are resource hogs and need a reasonable
fast server to run smoothly if you've got a lot of traffic;
and finding a good Zope-provider may prove a little more difficult
than the usual LAMP-based el-cheapo web hosting accounts...

-cpghost.

-- 
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Gary Kline
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 11:05:36PM +0100, Frank Shute wrote:
 On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:05:22PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
 

[[ ... ]]

 
  /*
   * strange:: the way that mutt queues [ and orders ] its replies and 
  threads is 
   * different from kmail.  I only use a GUI when there is a URL embedded, but
   * it must be down-queue.   
   */
 
 Use textproc/urlview with mutt  Firefox.


Frank, can you do me a favor and mail your ~/.urlview, please?
I installed this program a few years ago, but it only worked 
with lynx. I just found the url_handler.sh script so now have a
clue but if your ~/.urlview points to firefox you'll save me
some typing.   --Also [going further OT], I like Konsole even
better than xterm.--

 
  
 
  I would *rather* use vi and HTML-by-hand.   And produce very simple,
  readable,  uncluttered pages.  I don't use many graphics, e.g., I
  use the strength of HTML, php, blah ** 3.  
  
 
 
 Since you're a do it by hand person, I'll give you the benefit of my
 experiences doing my pages that way.
 
 My site is on a similar scale to yours and I've just kept it simple
 except where I've used server-side (PHP/Perl) and Javascript.


Sounds like what I've done, more/less.  My index file in 
www/data is PHP.  php keeps getting closer to C,  c; I've
written a few things in php.


 
 1.
 
 Use Firefox to develop with and install the webdeveloper plug-in:
 
 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
 
 Use vim not vi, since you get syntax highlighting with vim/gvim.


Mm, I'm familiar with vim; like it all right, but lost my 
~/.vimrc file (and my backup).  NP in this case.  vim does 
a solid job of highlighting.  

 
 Add x11/rgb to your system and:
 
 $ showrgb | less 
 
 will show you the websafe colours. Plug in the numbers to your
 stylesheet to get your preferred colours. You can view the colours
 with e.g:
 
 $ xterm -bg steelblue
 
 Or:
 
 http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp


Have the rgb app; when I began building my jottings pages I knew
the colors would set the philosophic/meditative mood, so in early
'02 I ripped off the light blue from the philosophy pages at
Lampeter.   Then used various color wheels to choose the other
colors.  This is about the outer limits of my design
capabilities, :-)


 
 I use Gimp for any graphics.


Impressive.  Anything at the level of The GIMP is beyond me.

 
 2.
 
 Choose a standard that you are going to code to and validate against.
 I use XHTML1.0 Transitional and CSS. Things are going more XML than
 HTML and transitional is less restrictive than strict.
 

Here is where it may be best to take this offlist.  I'm guessing
that XHTML is extended-HTML.  Yes/no?  = 10 years ago I
created some short stories andor essays using the Sytle Sheets.
But as you point out, XML is prob'ly the future of markup and I
know next to nothing about it.  

For example, given firstNameJohn/firstName, *where/what*
defines the tag?  Since the WWW bunch has given XML the nod, it
is both the present and future of a lot of the web.   ---So,
are there any books for Beginners you recommend?  You or anyone
else onlist who has waded thru this plea!


 3.
 
 Have a look at w3c schools site to learn your chosen language:
 
 http://www.w3schools.com/
 
 There are various tutorials and references there. Best site on the
 'net!
 

hMMM:-) Maybe I should've read ahead .


 4.
 
 Steal a simple page that validates:
 
 http://www.shute.org.uk/miscellany.html
 
 and use it as a template to hack on. Steal the style sheet too.
 
 Validate your webpage as you go along with the w3c validator.

Should I just google for the validator?  At any rate, thanks much
for the   two URL's above.  The more I can learn on my own
(without bothering anyone else), the better.


 
 5.
 
 A few tips:
 
 Use div's for layout, not tables.


i cannot // hhaven't made sense of DIV since I first saw it.
*This* may be where I've confused IE and Konq and it might be the
easiest way to create the layout that firefox gives me.

As I see it, ttables let you put rectangles anywhere; then you
can putt other things inside; how to do this with DIV is one
more black hole.



 
 Don't use fixed text heights, use relative so it respects the users
 preferences for text size.


I didn't understand you could hardwire a textsize; maybe I've
done it inadvertently ... 



 
 Keep an eye out for pages that look nice and validate. View source 
 then steal chunks of xhtml and css. 
 

I still have unread messages down-queue, but may as well ask if
there are any HTML/XML checkers in ports that would help validate
my mark.  David Kelly suggested 

Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Gary Kline
On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 06:14:26PM -0400, Bob Johnson wrote:
 On 5/29/08, Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Several weeks ago a friend asked why my www.thought.org page
  was so hard to read.  She said that part of my text was black
 [...]
  I'd be much obliged for any help here.
 
 
 
 Konqueror says that the comment that reads
 
 !-- click on Graphic to goto jottings.thought.org --!
 
 isn't closed until the end of the next comment way down the page, so
 it is ignoring all the code in between. I think that's your problem
 (there is a typo in the close of the comment). In other words,
 Konqueror seems to be displaying the page correctly. The other
 browsers are probably (incorrectly) treating end-of-line as
 end-of-comment.
 
 When you View Document Source in Konqueror, it highlights the markup
 to make it easier to spot such problems, and comments stand out pretty
 distinctly. In fact, it appears there are a few other places with that
 same typo (closing a comment with --!).
 


yes!  it looks like you are right on the money! next time you
are in seattle, i'll buy you a beer.

(also, this may explain why sometimes my comments bombbed during 
testing.  i thought ! .. ! was *legal*.  *mumble::censored*)

thank you * 1000,

gary


 - Bob

-- 
  Gary Kline  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org


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RE: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Ted Mittelstaedt


 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Kline
 Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:51 PM
 To: Ted Mittelstaedt
 Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List
 Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
 
 
   you probably didn't start with the earlier markup.  back then,
   '93-4, there was BR,P, B, and EM.   i wrote a 2.2K-line 
   program to handle hi - ``hi'' and a couple other things.
   the code has evolved, of course, but still works.
 

Not the case.  I use vi myself and I eschew background gifs and
such.  Web pages that I create are black text on a white back
ground interspersed with images when needed.  Period.  No CSS no frames, no
nothing.  If the content I put up isn't worth reading
then no amount of formatting, font specification, animated
images, and so forth is going to get people to look at it,
is my feeling.

Looking at your site, it's clear your not a true minimalist.
Thus, my recommendation to not even try.  Web page design has
got so complex that you basically have to do it full time to
made a page that looks professional.  If your going to create
pages, then a true minimalist page is just as functional and
just as good as an amateur attempt.  Meaning, both it and the
amateur page will look like crap, but people aren't there for
the looks they are there for the information, and they won't care.

Naturally, I am perfectly aware too many people assume that if
the page is unformatted that the content must be crap.  So, for
commercial sites that I am involved in that a lot of eyeballs
look at, I don't code those.  I have my wife code them - who IS
an HTML designer.  Watching her work I can see how much work
is involved in making a page look professional.  (she uses homesite,
which is a commercial html editor, it is not a wysiwyg like
dreamweaver)  I know that if I just do the usual job
that an amateur does, it's like a little kid riding a plastic
horse at the grocery store and pretending he's a cowboy.

Ted
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RE: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread Ted Mittelstaedt


 -Original Message-
 From: Gary Kline [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 3:14 PM
 To: Ted Mittelstaedt
 Cc: Kevin Downey; FreeBSD Mailing List
 Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
 
 
 
   Chill down a bit, okay?  first, (as the OP), i did not know
   thaat there was *this** great a disparity in thee rendering
   between classes of browsers.  i used to stick pretty close 
   to the w3.org (or whatever it was).   i didn't think the
   difference extended to how the TABLE stuff was parsed.
 

Gary, the problem is that the majority of people out there use
IE, most IE7, but still a lot of IE6, and a few deihards IE5.

Then there are the older versions of Safari on the Mac - there's
still a lot of Mac's around that are running 10.2 believe it or
not, and those came with MS IE for the Mac which -really- munges
some pages.  And Safari for Windows - which is a bit different than
Safari on the Mac.

And then there are all the Unix browsers.

There are some test programs that can help.  But the validators
can tell you your code is right and it still will display differently
in some of the browsers.  The only way to do it is to do what
the pros do - which is have all the different systems available
and load their pages in those browsers.

Telling people my site is fine your browser is fucked, get a
better one is the mark of an amateur who is also being extremely
presumptive.  It's the old do it my way or fuck off

This is what Microsoft tells people - and most FreeBSDers and
Linux people claim they are on the moral high ground because they
aren't forcing their stuff down people's throats - that is, 
until they create a webpage and then they have no problem forcing
software down people's throats to see it, I guess

Ted
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Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

2008-05-29 Thread DAve

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:



-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Kline
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:51 PM
To: Ted Mittelstaedt
Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List
Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.


you probably didn't start with the earlier markup.  back then,
	'93-4, there was BR,P, B, and EM.   i wrote a 2.2K-line 
	program to handle hi - ``hi'' and a couple other things.

the code has evolved, of course, but still works.



Not the case.  I use vi myself and I eschew background gifs and
such.  Web pages that I create are black text on a white back
ground interspersed with images when needed.  Period.  No CSS no frames, no
nothing.  If the content I put up isn't worth reading
then no amount of formatting, font specification, animated
images, and so forth is going to get people to look at it,
is my feeling.


I nearly spit coffee on my keyboard! I agree with you 100%. When we all 
did HTML with BBedit and Textpad, people like Black, Tog, and Nielsen 
kept everyone designing websites to best serve the content. Now it is 
all about the sizzle, but there is rarely a steak.


DAve

--
In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years
of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with
rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel
that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins.
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