Posts by MidiMagic

My area is so oversaturated that nobody is hiring them.

Actually, it can't be done in a way that works on all browsers, screen resolutions, and window sizes.

The internet is not designed to look like a Windows program. There is no provision for using either the window size or footers. The web is NOT intended to be used in this manner.

What is causing this sudden demand for footers on web pages?

They have never been possible in a browser-independent manner. All of the tricks used to try to get this fail on at least one browser.

Why in the world do you have a background image in a text box?

Nothing would make me hit my BACK button faster than that. I can't read text that is on top of an image.

There is no browser-independent way to do this, because there is no standard on how the screen size is stored in the browser.

The web is not designed to size things to the browser window. It is NOT like designing a windows program. The web is designed to expand downward as necessary.

Just use the body, and let the scrollbar appear when the content is too large.

Thanks.

That makes some sense. The only way I could see to do it was to put the entire block in (guess what) an invisible table with one cell. But this should get rid of the page reader error (I hope).

I already uploaded it as I tried it, because I wanted to use it today. But I am going to write this down and implement it later.

I wonder if it works around just the image. I will play with it some more when I get time.

For some reason, Firefox is again not reserving rendering space for the image. The first time, as I remember, the fix was to upgrade to Firefox 3. But they seem to have broken it again.

I just realized that this style could be useful in making divs stay put! You can have a table witiout having a table!!!

This just started yesterday. When I view your pages that contain moving ads, some of the times I click on things, I get two clicks, but not a double click:

- I click on the scroll arrows, and get two lines of scroll.

- I click on the scrollbar and the screen scrolls two window-fulls instead of one.

- I click on the Back button, and the browser goes back two pages.

This does not happen on my own website, but it does happen on some other sites with ads.

I am using Windows XP SP3 and Firefox 3.0.5.

Your pages with only stationary ads do not do this.

It's not the mouse. I checked that.

Are you playing them on your own computer, or are you serving these files to people using the Internet?

Just download a free player. Your viewers on the Internet must do this too, in the form of a plugin.

Let me guess: A publisher wants vector graphics.

Once you have downloaded the image, all pages can use the same copy without downloading it again. The only times it would be downloaded again are if the user refreshes the page, or if another page used so much Internet cache that the imaged had to be discarded. I use that trick in my pages.

If you are so paranoid and possessive that you put special features in to protect your intellectual property, I suggest that you don't publish it all. What does it hurt you if someone saves a copy. They can save the entire page, and have a folder full of parts.

These control panels are usually not part of the website, but are part of the operating system of the server. Your client just needs an account to use the server itself.

The best solution is to NOT layer. Browsers are really designed for items to be contained within other items, not on top of each other.

Sort of.

The availability of information for free over the Internet will eventually remove all value from anything that can be posted on the Internet. You would not need to pay for it.

I posted a question about this several months ago, but the search function is so bad that I can't find it again.

I again have an image that is being overlapped by a table below it in Firefox. This happens whenever the following is true:

- The image file is floated right.
- The test it is floated around is shorter vertically than the image is.

The image then sticks down into and overlaps the table.

It does not happen in Internet Explorer.

Here is code that does this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>UFO does not mean ET</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

<style type="text/css">

.cenx {text-align: center;}
.ceni {clear: both;}
.bxfix {margin: 0; border: none; padding: 0;}

.wfl {width: 100%;}
.hi {margin: 24pt 0;}
.fixim {height: 100%; float: right;}

img {padding: 12px;}
body {background-color: #ffeecc; padding: 5%; font-family: sans-serif;}
table {background-color: #ffffff; vertical-align: top; border: solid 1px #000088;}
th {background-color: #eeffe0; vertical-align: top; border: solid 1px #000088; padding: 4px;}
td {background-color: #ffffff; vertical-align: top; border: solid 1px #000088; padding: 0 4px; font-size: smaller;}

</style>
</head>

<body>
<h1 class="cenx">&quot;UFO&quot; does not mean &quot;ET&quot;</h1>
<div class="hi wfl">
 <img src="podium.jpg" alt="podium def" class="fixim" />
 <p>People call many things by the wrong names. Here is a list of objects erroneously given the wrong
 names by people who do not know better, and the correct names for them:</p>
</div>
<div class="hi wfl">
 <table class="wfl" cellspacing="0"> …

The reason we need the final code is that we need to see how it renders. There are places where different tags interact strangely.

But playing with JavaScript, PHP, and Perl can cause other rendering errors. One error I have seen is that an object that is not initially rendered is rendered wrongly when inserted later.

Can we see your website?

http://geocities.com/midimagic@sbcglobal.net/index.htm

I normally follow those rules. There are a few exceptions:

1. No angry fruit salad.

I never do this. And I especially avoid the "swoop" image in the upper left corner that so many sites use.

2. No text on top of graphics.

Never.

3. Don't change link colors.

Never.

4. No moving images for any purpose other than to show how something works.

Moving images have been used solely for the purpose of showing a sequence of events in tutorial pages. There are no sounds.

5. No mouseovers.

Never. I hate them.

6. No dropdown menus.

Never. I want all of the links to be visible all of the time. So I use menu pages instead. I do use a rainbow of background colors for the links on some menu pages.

7. Don't use tables in non-tabular situations if you can avoid it.

I use tables for my link tables.

Occasionally I use a table for layout purposes, but only where div+css needs a kludge to work, or won't do the job right.

8. No rotating galleries or moving banners.

Never.

9. Don't make anything blink.

Never.

10. Leave space between items.

Always. But I discovered that the latest version of IE doesn't always render things as I intended, and I haven't yet had time to fix all of …

The Internet will remove all of the value.

The search function is totally useless.

I am searching for an old post I made on fixing a problem with Firefox overlapping images with tables placed below them. The solution was in the post. But the search function will not find the post.

Instead, it is finding posts that have only one of the keywords I put, instead of requiring that all of the keywords be present.

Questions:

- Are you aware that you have unescaped ampersands in your code? Each "&" must be replaced with the "&" string.

- Did you give the .flv file public read permission?

- Does your host computer allow you to serve .flv downloads? Mine requires a website hosting upgrade, with an extra monthly fee.

- Does your ISP allow you to download .flv files to your computer? Some do not.

- Check your firewall. It might be blocking such a download.

I don't know if that is possible. Vector graphics contain descriptions of the objects in the picture, such as lines, rectangles, polygons, circles, etc. They have to be drawn by the artist. A photograph has no such information within it. Vector graphics make no sense for images taken with a camera, because they are not directly composed of lines, rectangles, polygons, circles, etc.

Vector graphics are for diagrams and mechanical drawing.

I see several errors, if you want compatibility:

- Don't set sizes (width, height) and nonzero surrounding styles (margin, border, padding) in the same style or tag. IE crams the surrounding styles inside the sizes. Other browsers put the surrounding styles outside the sizes.

- Do not use 0px (or any other unit of measure with 0). Firefox throws away the style if it has this. Just put a 0 for zero values.

- Don't define sizes in pixels if you want compatible pages. Use points or percentages.

There are several possibilities:

- The notices from Google might have been phake, used for phishing purposes.

- Links from the site might point to sites containing malware. They might also point to sites that point to sites containing malware.

- Some malware software identifies most cookies as malware.

- It's rare, but I once had a malware detection program identify an image I took with my own camera as containing a virus. It turned out that the bit patterns in part of the image matched the bit patterns in a known virus. Slightly changing the brightness level of the image fixed this.

- Some detectors see certain scripts as malware.

- If the notices are based on user reports, a user might have reported malware he already had, because it started to manifest itself while he was viewing your page.

- Likewise, a user might have reported malware that was caused by another internet node pretending to be your page.

Just what we don't need. Use scroll BUTTONS. Make a nice page, not cute tricks that annoy.

Further information:

1. No angry fruit salad.

The problem with huge amounts of graphics is that it upsets the process of reading the text. Regular viewers tend to use the back button too, because they can't find the info without spending a lot of time. If I need info in a hurry, I will back out of a complicated page with no obvious info.

2. No text on top of graphics.

The perception problems combine the text and graphics into an unreadable mess. And the watermark does NOT disappear from this posting window, until the post becomes large enough to scroll.

3. Don't change link colors.

Nobody ever NEEDS to change the link colors. Don't do it!

4. No moving images for any purpose other than to show how something works.

Moving images usually make a lot of people hit the back button. So do suddenly appearing sounds.

5. No mouseovers.

Are people too lazy to click the mouse? Why do you need to make actions they do not want to happen happen? Mouseovers are extremely annoying, especially if you are trying to do something the the mouseover covered up. Require a mouse click for each action.

We need usable pages, not fancy bells and whistles.

6. No dropdown menus.

Why hide the links? What's wrong with a table of links somewhere on the page? These are smells and bells and whistles. They say, "Look! I can …

You are trying to do something that can't be done in a way that works on all browsers, screen resolutions, and window sizes. There is no provision in the design of the internet for a footer that is at the bottom of the screen. You are wasting your time trying to do it.

The internet is NOT designed to display a page in the way a Windows program displays it. It is designed to present things in a continuous web of material from the top of the screen until the information runs out.

You can put margins outside the ul or ol tags with css.

You can't block the source code. If the user can't get to it, the browser can't render the page.

The Internet is NOT for keeping secrets.

There are browser functions that can look at the entire contents of a folder. You can't keep that secret either, unless you remove public access. But if you remove public access, you remove the ability to put the page on the Internet.

You have to take one of two stands:

1. "It's mine and you can't have it!" In that case, don't put it on the internet.

2. "Here, you can have it."

I am sick of people who want to publish something, but are afraid of someone else stealing it.

When you place your web page online, EVERYONE has access to your source code.

They can't prevent such a use of the data. I have some simple software that extracts text from images. It could easily reconstruct the information. So can anyone who can type.

Why are you so afraid that people will use the information? That's what the Internet is for.

I believe that intellectual property will become a thing of the past within ten years. The internet will make it totally impossible to maintain.

My more recent websites validate with XHTML 1.0 transitional with no errors or warnings. But still i have to use hacks but i could do the same with additional style sheets (if i thought it would make a huge difference.)

Do you use tables then? bit old fashioned ;)

I use tables when I need to present material in tabular form.

Tables are NOT outdated, just used for the wrong thing (in addition to the correct use). Tables are also not deprecated. Here are the best uses:

- Tables are certainly the proper way to show something looking like a spreadsheet. Tables of numbers and facts are very valid uses.

- I use tables for the placement of blanks and instructions within forms, because this is a form of tabular information.

- I use tables to arrange link buttons in tabular form.

- Although this is not a use condoned by the W3C, I use tables where it is absolutely essential that the structure must stay together if it doesn't fit in the browser window. There is yet no other reliable way to do it that works on all browsers. I usually use this to make sure that pictures stay with the text they belong to, instead of being scattered around by the browser trying to make things fit.

- I do NOT use tables to create basic structures.

The W3C wanted to remove tables from the following uses, because web page readers …

Open the volume control, use the mixer function to mute the microphone on the speakers. Then open the sound recorder and enable the microphone in the recorder.

Note that the speaker and headphone output are the same thing. You need different settings in the volume control mixer to use one or the other.

Sometimes I use Word and look for free clip art for it. Then I copy the image I pasted to a file.

Can you use word, inserting images as needed?

Now we just have to teach the beginners the meaning of that lorem ipsum stuff. :icon_cheesygrin:

Design your pages for accessibility.

In my position as a college instructor, I see many places where fancy web page design gets people with visual problems, dyslexia, or learning disabilities into trouble. Here are my suggestions for making your web pages more accessible:

1. No angry fruit salad.

If you put a huge amount of intricate graphics on the page, it distracts the accessibility user, and he has trouble reading the text. My computer dictionary calls this explosion of graphics "angry fruit salad."

2. No text on top of graphics.

Some visual learning disabilities (including dyslexia) cause text placed on top of graphics to become unreadable. This also includes the text on watermark text in the submission window used to post this.

3. Don't change link colors.

People with learning disabilities use the standard colors to find links. They can also set their accessibility browsers to return the colors to standard. If you change the link colors, or if you place the link in an object with a colored background that matches a standard link color, they can't find the links.

4. No moving images for any purpose other than to show how something works.

Moving images trigger responses in certain individuals that attract the eye away from the text. So they never get to finish reading the text. If you must have a moving image, include a button to start the motion.

5. No mouseovers.

A mouseover function …

What would you do it then? I have no idea how else you can get around it. You will always have the problem of there being different setting places browsers add padding whatever you do. Unless you make a different style sheet for the IE browsers.

I write browser-independent code:

1. I don't put nonzero surrounding styles (margin, border, padding) in the same tags or styles that contain widths or heights. If I need both, I nest tags, one with sizes, and the other with surrounding styles, in the order I want them nested.

Violating this causes large differences between IE (not following the W3C standard of nesting) and all of the other browsers.

2. I don't expect the page to look exactly the same on all browsers. I accept the slight differences in rendering, instead of trying to smash everything into compliance. So I make sure it renders correctly with the slight variations.

3. I set vertical alignment for table cells. Different browsers have different defaults. Certain other items also have different defaults.

4. I test everything on multiple browsers and different window sizes.

If I really have a "Small Browser Problem," I maximize the window.:icon_mrgreen:

This is going too far on the tableless page movement!

The original reasons they wanted tables removed from page development are:

- Tables announce their presence by row and column number when accessibility features for the blind are used.

- Before we had margins and padding, tables were the only way to put a margin around the content of the web page.

- People were cutting up images and putting them in table cells to get around server file size limitations.

- People were using tables to control layout or provide sidebars (this is not yet fully solved without using tables).

A form is a form of tabular data. So don't be afraid to use tables here. Table isn't deprecated - it's not going away like center did.

There are also browser settings that can override any changes a page makes to link colors.

It is bad business to change link colors, because it can render the page inaccessible to people who set standard link colors for accessibility reasons.

The receivers are different because there might be two of them in use in the same room (e.g. office or classroom).

This happens because the game is using so much of the CPU time that the mouse pointer doesn't get refreshed often enough.

Check the following:

1. Some other pointing device in use

2. Loose connection

3. dead battery (some mice, especially wireless, have batteries)

4. Malware

5. Bad mouse (usually a bad spot in the cable, or a stuck button).

6. Dead BIOS battery.

I'm not recording music this time. My friend is taking an online class. We need something cheap. I found that the cassette recorder mics with 3/16" plugs do work.

I was wondering about compatibility, because one website said you needed a powered mic.

Create your own.

For anyone else who thinks they can help more than I have. To open the attached file you need to drag the link in to your browser's address bar and it should download.

It does not. I tried that too. The player opens. but there is no content in the file.

Midimagic: This uses the default play on the computer, that is the point!

What if you don't have a player installed that plays that kind of file?

I have to have three different audio players just to play the files I do have, and there are other file types I can't play, because I have problems with the way the players for those files affect computers.

Not to mention i am a great believer in using quicktime rather than windows anyway. Oh wait, I'm a mac user.

Also, when you update quicktime, does it not ask you what mime types to associate?

No, it does not. Like a bull in a china shop, it does what it wants.

You can set it to not do this. But when it automatically updates the nest time, it turns off that setting. If you don't notice that the setting was turned off, the following time it updates, it grabs all of the file defaults in Windows Explorer. I have even seen it grab file types it can't play.

It also installs itself in such a way that it can't be uninstalled without reinstalling Windows.

IE is the worst offender when it comes to standards compliance.

Percentages are hard, unless you realize that IE and FF make it seem harder than it really is.

The average desinger applies all of the styles to the same tag. Example:

He writes this style:

.divwid {width: 50%; margin: 10pt;}

Then he tries to place two div tags with text content side by side.

<div class="divwid">Put lots of text here.</div>
<div class="divwid">Put even more text here.</div>

IE places the divs side by side, because it places the margin inside the set width. but makes the divs look taller, because the text space is less than 50 percent wide.

FF makes the text space 50 percent wide, But the margin is OUTSIDE that 50 percent,. so both divs don't fit in a horizontal row. But each div is not as tall as it is in IE

But he CAN make both browsers behave the same way on this:
Example:

He writes these styles:

.divwid {width: 50%; margin: 0; border: none; padding: 0;}
.divnest {margin: 10pt;}

Then he places two sets of nested div tags with text content side by side.

<div class="divwid">
  <div class="divnest">Put lots of text here.</div>
</div>
<div class="divwid">
  <div class="divnest">Put lots of text here.</div>
</div>

This time, both browsers do the same thing. The outer divs are exactly 50 percent wide. The inner divs apply the margin, with the text inside the margin.

Done this way, percentages become …

Your code contains bgcolor = #000000 in the body tag.

That makes the background black. What did you expect it to do?

White is #ffffff.

Google uses search robots to probe each ISP for web pages.

If the ISP has a "no robots" flag set, then Google skips the probe, but it will still find individual pages on those sites when pages on other ISPs contain links to them.

You really can't control how Google will place your site, for two reasons:

1. You don't know what the user will enter into the search window.

2. Your placement is not an absolute location, but is relative to the placements of other sites with better or worse matches to the search text. The best matches appear first.

Google does look for page packing, where the same word is repeated over and over without intervening text. It ignores that word in that site when doing the search.

These are fundamental differences in the way IE and Firefox render items. These are some of the differences between IE and Firefox:

- FF places surrounding styles (margins, borders, padding) outside defined widths and heights. IE crams them inside the defined sizes. This makes some things fit differently. The fix is to place only zero surrounding styles in the same tag or style containing size styles.

- FF throws away the entire style if it contains either of the following:
--- A zero value with a unit of measure (e.g. 0px, 0%, opt)
--- A nonzero value without a unit of measure (e.g. 12) on certain styles.

- IE treats images differently than it treats other box objects.

- Each IE font rendering is one pixel higher and wider than the corresponding FF font.

- IE and FF render borders differently.

- IE and FF have different defaults on how to vertically place text inside td tags.

- IE and FF behave differently when content does not fit inside a defined space.

- IE and FF place margins and padding differently with hr tags.

Every web developer uses something that does the same or similar to photoshop, unless they are designing a purely text base website.

I don't.

I use notepad to write the code, a digital camera for images, and either Corel Photo-Paint or mspaint to create the graphics.