My new site layout...

Working on it at the moment... what do you think?

http://www.heathcosoft.com/v2

Looks like you may be as bad at web design as I am.

Check out the Open Source Web Design.

Gee, there's some motivation

Any other opinions? Some of my buddies who do design for a living liked it, but I thought I'd get a few more...

I don't think it's too bad. I'm also trying to start web design, but I need to work on the design. I'm pretty good at HTML, but my biggest setback is that I'm not an artist.

For example, there are a lot of teenagers out there with their personal web pages They look really nice because they got a cool color scheme and have a really nice banner at the top of their page or whatever, but the rest of the thing is just a blog or something. Something that doesn't require much coding.

I'm good at HTML, but my graphics skills are shit. You can see that at my own sit, www.dignan17.com

My other drawback is that I'm no good at JS or other web languages. I'm not a language person. I took a year of C++, the intro stuff, and got a D.

What does this mean for you? I don't know. study up on photoshop and stuff if you want, but if you like the design of your site, don't change it if you don't want to.

I love the hard drive on that Northgate system on your page: "52 MB IDE Hard drive".

You can't even install any recent Windows operating system on a drive that small. Hell, you can't even store an album's worth of decent MP3 files in that kind of space.

Like you said, puts things in perspective.

Although I still love the Northgate keyboards. We have a few left over around our office, I'm hoarding them.

The original (ie. current) site looks better IMHO.

I agree totally. Did you link us to the wrong URL?

Well, the attached is what I see using Netscape 4.73 (company standard). As you can tell, its not pretty...

Ah, John learns the important lesson of testing multi-platform browser compatibility.

Well, actually I knew this site would be for Netscape 6 or IE 4. I'm not even going to ask why you would be running Netscape 4.73 .

Thats why I specified (company standard) in my post. We aren't allowed to use something else

You know, it just occurred to me to look at it under IE. Here's what it looks like under Mozilla 1.0:

Aha. Looks like the problem might be that your web server is sending it as text/html (and the filename is .html) and Mozilla wants it to be application/xhtml+xml or text/xml or application/xml (and .xhtml) in order for it to be passed through its xhtml renderer.

I can't really test it right now, since it depends on other things on your site to render properly, but try seeing if you can fix that, and I'll give it another go.

Granted, there's a Netscape population out there, but I couldn't for the life of me get my site to look good in that horrible browser. It simply didn't do things correctly and logically.

Then there's always this.
I know it's not a good excuse, but what the hell.

I will definitely have to start checking my page out in Mozilla and the other browsers sometime.

Hehe, thanks Tony. Yeah, I love looking through those old mags that were just lying in my dad's office. I have no idea why they're there. we just randomly have like 15 (PC World I believe) magazines lying around, dating between 92 and 94. They're a hoot to look through.

"New 16lb laptops!"

how many ISA slots did the lap tops have

Well I found the problem... my site wasn't displaying properly in mozilla because the server I'm currently on (I'm switching to another host) has a very outdated version of PHP, and it sends out old content-type headers.

Hahaha. Yeah. The only problem is, if you are trying to sell services, having a page that shows up that badly in a browser, even if its only used by 4% of the people, is going to turn those people off of your services.

You could always check what borwser and version they have and send them the corresponding page.

I don't like netscape and mozilla. IE makes it 10 times easier to get your stuff looking right, in my opinion.

In reply to:

---

Hell, you can't even store an album's worth of decent MP3 files in that kind of space.

---

Yeah, and how are you going to play MP3's through the PC speaker that only goes beep!

Duuuuhhh - 'cos it works?

IE does make layout a lot easier, but at the same time it lets you get away with a lot messier coding.
I've found that IE alwasy trys to "guess" what I was trying to code, and if I've f'd it up, it fixes it.
If I then go into Netscape, the page is a mess, cause Netscape doesnt try and guess what I was trying to do. It just displays the page as I've coded it. Right or wrong. This is especially applicable with tables, frames, and link URL formatting.
For example: If you have a space in a link URL on your page (a no-no), IE will automatically put a %20 in where the space was so it works for the end user. Netscape will just puke on it, and you'll get emails and calls saying that your links are broken.
The correct way to code it is without the space. IE fixes it for you, but that doesnt make it right.
I love IE, but Netscape users will always exist, and NS 6.0 is no treat either. I always test in NS 4.08 ( the last version of the standalone browser before 6.0), NS 6.0, Mozilla, IE and Opera. Its a pain, but it makes for bombproof code.

Sorry that was a little long, blab, blab, blab...

Z~

I agree. It would be nice to cater to all the browsers, but I'm finding that even if I code it correctly, it still doesn't work. Trust me, I spent A LOT of time on the tables on my site, and they appear to be coded correctly. I just downloaded Mozilla, and it screwed up part of it. Take a look if you have it: www.dignan17.com

If you see those two huge red lines that go all the way across the page, that's not correct. Those red lines are supposed to be 1 pixel tall. The overall table on that page has 5 rows in it, and each of those lines is supposed to be a row with one cell that is 1 pixel high with a background of red. It's coded like this:

  <tr>

    <td height="1" bgcolor="red"></td>

  </tr>

I don't see what could be simpler about that. It doesn't get any more clear. Please tell me if there's something wrong with my browser compatability with this code. Do the different browsers still require some different codes for various attributes?

Looks like it renders a cell at least tall enough to fit the standard font size - tossing a font tag with size="1" in there reduces the size, somewhat... (Mozilla 1.0)

Might be that they subscribe to the line of though that tables should be used for actual tables, not layout.

/Michael

It is often said by Flash users that one of the benefits is that there are no problems with a page looking different between browsers...

Following the same logic, maybe we need an HTML plugin?

You mean you never used the driver for Win3.11 that turned the PC speaker into a WAV output device ?

(how "good" it sounded depended on whether you had a real speaker or a tiny peizo electric ones)

Come to think of it, back in the mists of time an old friend of mine did play me a sample from The Terminator on his dads 486. Apparently it said "I'll be back" but to me it sounded like "SHHHHHHHHH". It sounded like a bag of sh*te compared to my Archimedes and its 8 bit audio output.

Hey Dignan, try putting border=0 or taking the quotes out of the height=1.

I don't know if it'll work, but it's worth a shot.

I try to stay away from using tables as much as possible, and instead use CSS for layout. You might want to check here for more info.

Mac IE doesn't display those cells at all because they have no content.

Mozilla is assuming that the cell will contain text and so is setting a default minimum height. Do it as a stretched one-pixel image instead. Or better yet, use CSS.

It isn't that your code is necessarily wrong, you're just using tables for something that they aren't designed for and it just happens that Win IE displays it as you expect.

Actually, I'm using HTML 4.01 strict, which is perhaps the most picky HTML version in existence... so I'm not doing it to cover up my mistakes

DiGNAN, that's cause of the font sizes. Either use CSS and do something like <td style="font-size: 0pt;"> or just put a blank gif image in there, that's what most people do. Create a transparent 1x1 gif image, and do something like:

<td><img src="blank.gif" width="1" height="1"></td>

Yeah, that's what I'm figuring.

But this is all proving my point for me isn't it? You're all saying things like "it's assuming" and such. You know what happens when you assume, right? So why are we saying it's IE that's "fixing it for me", when it's really the other borwsers that are f'ing it up?

When I say "make me a table cell that is 1 pixel tall" and it does that, I consider that to be working correctly. If the browser is making space for text that isn't there, why is that correct? That code is straightforward and simple, so why should a browser not follow it as written? It's just not making sense to me.

Because a table isn't a graphical element. It's a textual element.

In this case, we're (well, I'm) not saying IE is being lenient. It's just rendering it differently. HTML was designed so that different renderings would both be correct. It was never intended for multiple browsers to show the exact same thing. Of course, anal retentive designers decided they wanted that, plus non-binary graphics capability, and instead of generating a new markup language, they decided to hack the hell out of the existing one.

IMHO, if you want something to match those criteria, go use SVG.

Ah, okay. I see. I just wish they were graphical, because they lend themselves to more logical page formatting than most of what I've seen. I guess it's time to start learning the new standards all over again. Argh.

Oh well, thanks for clearing it up!

I've found that since those basic premises have changed, there's a lot more uniformity in what gets rendered. So, given that few browsers actually support SVG, if you stick with using style sheets (or something newer than that), you'll end up seeing something more regular across browsers.

BTW, to be less snarky, you'll notice that the HEIGHT tag is marked as deprecated in the HTML spec.

Yeah, use style="height: 10px" or what not...

An empty table data will always display as approx 1 font character high. I think its around 7 pixels. One way around this is to put a 1x1 clear gif in the table data, and use it to specify your table data size. You can then use the bgcolor in the table data to specify color. You dont need to make the clear gif the whole size of the table data, just 1x1 should do it.
This works good to bump out width too.
<tr>
<td bgcolor="red"><img src="clear.gif" height="1" width="1"></td>
</tr>
That should do it for you.
You can also do it with style sheets, but thats a whole other ballgame.
Z~
P.S. I attached a 1 pixel x 1 pixel clear gif, if you need it.

For positioning, I like using:

style="position:absolute; top:20px; left:50px; height:10px; width:20px"

I think it works in all browsers, so it makes it easy to position stuff, and you can even put images, text, or whatever on top of eachother like overlapping.

Yeah, I know how to do all these tricks, don't worry. All I've been saying is that tables, at least to me, seem to lend themselves nicely for graphical layout, and code like the stuff I posted seems so straightforward and simple, that it should work exactly like that. That's all I'm saying. Whatever it's original purpose was, I don't see why browsers have to stick to that way. I mean, seriously, there is no reason to maintain that space for text that doesn't exist!

But if people want different standards for reasons I can't understand, whatever. I'll live with it. It just seems illogical to me.