a basic highlighting editor? What's HTML Tidy?

a basic highlighting editor?

One that will highlight the syntax of your HTML so that it is easier to pick out tags. Usually, they will highlight different tags in different colors/font styles, and they will often highlight the text that has been marked up, as well (like making text surrounded by <B> tags bold and <A> tags underlined, etc). They're useful because it's easier to see your layout and they usually also perform some very basic syntax checking.

What's HTML Tidy?

It's a program that tidies your HTML, formatting it in a more consistent fashion, and sometimes editing out extraneous tags, especially the stuff MS products like to put in. HTML Tidy

> WYSIWYG editing is nice, but the program does stuff for me that I don't want it to. Then I spend a while fixing it. That annoys me.

Well, if you do things in the visual mode, it will add code that may not be completely to your liking. I do stick in the code editor 99% of the time, flipping over to the visual editor only to take a look, or rarely, to create something visually. I certainly wouldn't use any of its Javascript creation stuff, as it is generates code that is overly complicated. You sound like you would be happier using it more like what David calls a "basic highlighting editor", which it does quite well.

Yeah, I did experiment a little bit with the visual mode, but found that to be the case. Didn't like it. The split screen is nice too. Does anyone know of a way to get it to display split screen vertically instead of horizontally?

Like I said, I'm getting used to it

You've got to be kidding me. 540px is nothing! Just look around the internet and the average is probably 800 pixels wide.

I didn't say it was the most common width...

That's if the site has a limited width at all. I really disagree that 540 pixels is a good width.

Oh, I wasn't saying it should appear 540 pixels wide if your browser window happens to be wider than that. I was just saying that, as a good compromise between inclusiveness and ease of designing, the site should still be usable in a 540-pixel window without horizontal scrolling. Ideally, though this gets harder the more HTML gimmicks one uses, it should scale from 540 pixels all the way up to 1920 -- but making pages that look sensible wider than 1000 is difficult.

This BBS stays readable down to 540 pixels (unless someone writes a lot of monospaced text). So does Google. The news.bbc.co.uk story pages do too, though you can't see the links at the right. I guess it's a marketing call, really: whether you reckon you'll lose more readers by frustration at using your site, than you'd gain by using whatever funky layout somehow can't be written to be stretchy.

Peter

This BBS stays readable down to 540 pixels (unless someone writes a lot of monospaced text)

Can anyone think of a good fix for this, without totally bloating the BBS HTML that is spit out? Individual tables for each comment should fix it, but I'm not sure how much bloat it would introduce. The really bad part is that moderators and admins can't fix it either. I tried on my ext3 post that caused it to spew across the screen, and I simply can't reedit it without the BBS code making it worse.

Maybe put such text inside an IFRAME so that it's scrollable on its own?

monospaced text

Can anyone think of a good fix for this, without totally bloating the BBS HTML that is spit out?

Have the "code" tag produce <tt> rather than <pre>? Unlike HTML, BBS-code doesn't discard linefeeds, so <pre> isn't needed so often. And you could convert spaces to U+00A0's in case whitespace was significant.

Peter

Okay, sorry to bring up the Dreamweaver stuff again, but I've run into something puzzling and I've never been sure how to solve it.

It has to do with various horizontal alignments in a table cell. Say I have a cell. In that cell I want to have an image at the top, followed by several paragraphs of text. I want the image centered and the text aligned to the left.

So what I did was this. I figured I might have a bunch of other things that I might want centered in that cell as well, so I just put code in the cell tag that the alignment was centered. So okay, this centers everything, as I expect. Then to make the text aligned to the left, I put span tags around the text and put a style element in it for text-align. This is successful and aligns all the text to the left side of the cell. So I have everything how I want it, right?

Well, just to check I open the file up in IE and all the text is centered. Dreamweaver shows that it's aligned to the left, IE says it's centered.

How do I do what I'm trying to do??

Here's the code I used:

<span style="text-align: left"></span>

Also, tell me if I'm wrong, but is this how I call up an external style sheet??

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css" />

Easy solution is to just put the image in one cell, start a new row and the text in another cell. You can't rely on each browser to implement thig sort of thing in the same way.

Well, that stinks, but oh well. I just set it all to left alignment, and added white space to the left of the image. Works for me.

And I just found something that has switched me over to being a Dreamweaver user. It's called CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE

In reply to:

---

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css" >

---

Remember to ensure that the server sends mystyle.css with the correct content-type. The value in the "type" attribute is just a hint to the browser (to help it choose which stylesheet, perhaps); what the server says is authoritative.

Okay, cool. I was just using code that I think is provided by the w3c, so I figured it was cool. I've used it with 4 sites on 4 different servers and they've all worked fine.

But I have found that Dreamweaver does a pretty poor job of displaying CSS in the preview pane. For example, they provide the CSS tags for hyperlink states, yet the links are still the default blue and decorated the default way in the preview. On many fields they tell you that Dreamweaver doesn't display certain attributes you assign, but it has problems with others it says it does show. odd.