Posts by MidiMagic

It usually works. But you can not guarantee that it will work every time. When it doesn't work, the user can refresh the page, and hopefully the path will not go though an old routing computer the second time.

It will become a big problem if a selling transaction is disrupted by an old routing computer. With a missing packet, a business transaction may not look the same on both ends, to the point where the ordered merchandise is different or the money amounts are different.

This happened to me a few weeks ago. i was filling out a required government form online, and a packet was lost. This caused several of the questions and text boxes to be missing, and one text box to be paired with the wrong question. I filled it out as I saw it, and then had to go into the government office when they emailed me about the crazy answers.

Why didn't their page follow the ASCII filenames? They have an omega in their name.

0px is not a valid style. Use just 0 for all 0 values. Do not attach a unit of measure. It causes some browsers to throw away the style.

It could be that the server doesn't know how to use a .pptx file yet. Or it might not know to serve some auxillary file.

Did you use some built in file in the presentation, but forget to upload it? Missing parts can make corrupt downloads.

Note that the client computer has to actually have Office 2007 to play the .pptx file, or it must have a compatibility package for Office 2003 installed.

I would not yet use .pptx files on web pages. There are too few people with Office 2007 at this time.

Don't use pixels to define sizes. This introduces incompatibilities that depend on screen resolution.

A cracker may be trying to overload the site to exploit vulnerability.

If you have a border, margin, or padding, it goes OUTSIDE the size attribute. This makes the total width greater than 800px.

Don't put the style tags in an external style sheet.

Every ISP I have ever used since 1998 has created dummy IP addresses. I haven't had dial-up since 1993.

The IP address the ISP gets is real. But anything it puts out on the Internet has a one-time throwaway IP address.

Using pixels to define sizes causes all kinds of trouble. Different screen resolutions display the pixel sizes in different ways.

Negative sizes are not defined. This throws browsers into quirks mode.

Don't put size styles (width, height) and nonzero surround styles (margin, border, padding) in the same style or in the same tag. Using them together causes browser incompatibilities.

Don't put units of measure on 0 values. This causes Firefox to throw out the entire style and enter quirks mode.

The contents of the file do not matter. They get passed along, no matter what.

It is the name of the file, in the url, that has to meet these standards.

Like others said, your web page may not stay within the borders of the country you want on its way from the server to the client. The Internet chooses the route that momentarily looks like will take the least time to get there. When the request packet for a web page goes from Shanghai to Beijing, it may pass through Finland, Netherlands, Nigeria, Namibia, Greece and Pakistan. On the way from Beijing to Shanghai, the beginning of the file may go through nodes in India, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Turkey. Meanwhile the second packet goes through Japan, Juneau Alaska, Chicago, and Russia. This is beyond your control. But if ANY of those routing computers along the way can't read the filename, it returns an error message and throws away the packet. Then the client does not get part of the page.

Any routing hardware and software must be able to handle and send on the packet. That means that the software in that unit must be able to read the packet header. The filename is in the url in the packet header.

There is not a simple little fix for this. It would take billions of dollars and man-hours to upgrade all of the routing computers in the world. And with various security and copyright …

It can't be done in a way that works on all browsers. IE and FF don't even agree on the meaning of height as applied to a body tag container.

Just let the page scroll if it doesn't fit. That is what you are expected to do.

Not a good solution, because it uses pixel widths.

action="none"

That's experience.

There are different players for use with Windows, plugin for IE, and plugin for FF.

You can't put a player on your site for your users to use. The user has to already have the player on his computer to play your file.

IE6 might not have the resize capabilities that later browsers have.

Specify only the width, and the height should automatically resize. If you specify both, and the height ratio is not the same as the width ratio, the aspect ratio will change, and you may get more blurring.

You should not have this information. Spamming is the only reason anyone wants it.

The IP address is usually useless anyway. Most ISPs, hosts, and routers now generate one-time IP addresses, to prevent spamming. Each time someone logs in, they get a new one.

You don't need it.

Answers:

For browser and monitor screen resolution compatibility:
- Use % to place objects on the page or set sizes on the page.
- Use em for sizes and distances related to the text size rendered.
- Use the relative text size names, or use a percentage of the base font, to set font sizes.
- You can use % or em to resize an image, but it might lose quality.
- Use em to get border sizes that stay the same as the resolution changes. But they might get fuzzy edges, due to the boundaries not lining up with the edges of the pixels.

To make objects appear a certain size on the screen (assuming the computer knows the screen size):
- Use in or cm for absolute sizes.
- Use in or cm to resize an image to a specified size. But be aware that the image might lose quality. Specify the width, and the height will scale proportionally. If you specify both width and height, the image might be distorted.
- Use pt to specify a type point size of text. Note that this can change with different resolutions.

For fixed size objects:
- If you do not specify the size of an image, it will default to the pixel size of the image itself as it fits on the screen.
- Use px to make an image as sharp as it can be. …

There are two kinds of css failure:
1. The css has errors in it that prevent correct rendering.
2. The css renders, but not the way the page creator wants.

1. Look for the following css errors if the css does not render:
- Look for typogoofical errors first.
- On Firefox, use the error console. It will tell you the line containing any syntax error.
- Make sure you spelled the classes and ids the same in all references.
- Make sure you didn't use the same name for two different classes or ids.
- Make sure you didn't use an id twice.
- Make sure that there are no units of measure on 0 values. Some browsers do not allow them.
- No special characters in classes and ids.
- Beware of deprecated and browser-specific styles and properties.

2. Look for the following if the css does not render the way desired:
- Remember that the surrounding styles (margin, border, padding) are rendered OUTSIDE any box object. Leave enough space for them to fit.
- If something intended for the same row renders below the row, it probably does not fit in the remaining space.
- Don't put size styles (width, height), and surrounding styles in the same style or tag. This is the key to inter-browser compatibility.
- Is the div shrinking, instead of containing the contents? Use the style: display: …

On a cartoon where a car is driving up the vertical face of a cliff, one bystander says to another: "He doesn't know that it can't be done. He never read the instruction book in the glove compartment."

The Internet and html are not designed to make a web page exactly fit the browser display pane. Yet, we keep getting people who keep trying, and trying, and trying.

The system is designed to make the page fit the width of the page, start at the top, and expand downward until all of the content is rendered. The W3C purposely left out the ability to fit a display pane.

A 100% height refers to the height of the content, not the browser window.

What are you going to do when someone views your page on one of the new 16x9 monitors????

Too much time is wasted trying to make a page exactly fit the browser window. But no matter what you do, it won't work on all computers, screen resolutions, monitor aspect ratios, browsers, and restored down window dimensions.

The best advice I can give you is to make the page using percentages, and make it wide, but short vertically.

The ONLY style selector that works with hover is

a:hover

It affects ALL a links on the page. You can't make it work on just one anchor tag.

Which way do you want the navigation to display. Note that if the horizontal navigation bar does not fit in the allocated space, it will change to vertical. Make sure you leave extra space for margins, borders, and padding outside each item.

If Google sets a width when it loads, it overrides anything you do.

Note that target is deprecated in xhtml.

You really can't control what the page looks like until it finishes loading.

marquee is a deprecated tag.

0px is an invalid style in some browsers. Use 0 instead. Those browsers throw out the whole style when they encounter a 0 with a unit of measure.

"Lucide Sans Unicode" is not a valid font name. It may work on YOUR browser, because you have it defaulted to that font. But nobody else will see it, because they have no font file named "Lucide Sans Unicode" on their computers.

Your spelling has to agree with the name of the file on the OTHER user's computer. The other computers have "Lucida Sans Unicode" instead. You can't make up your own spellings and expect them to work

If you want screen resolution compatibility in your pages, use % and em to set your sizes.

The div tag is a generic box container.

The span tag is a generic device for adding styles (such as fonts) to text.

There's a world outside of USA. If a system doesn't allow characters outside the limited ASCII set, it's the system that needs to be changed.

The problem is that this will take years to accomplish. Because governments do not agree with each other, it may never happen. You need a solution that works now.

Think about all of the various nodes, servers, and routers in different countries. They use different software, they were made by different manufacturers, and they are owned by different entities. Some of these entities are private companies, and others are owned by various governments.

The Internet is not one big uniform system. It is patched together by hundreds of organizations. It is amazing that it works as well as it does.

You have to realize that your website files may pass through ANY of these devices in its path from your server to the client's computer. In fact, different packets from the same file might pass through different devices.

You do not know how current the software is on any of these devices. Some countries can't import anything newer than 2001, because the US export ban applies to them. So you need to supply files that are compatible with all of these devices that your file might encounter on its path across the world to the user.

The one thing that is available among ALL of these devices is the US ASCII one byte code. You can't count on anything else …

You are always going to have screen resolution problems when you define things in terms of pixels. Use percent and em to define sizes.

Check to see if it uses codes specific to IE. If it does, you will not be able to fix the problem without using html, css, or a script.

On a similar BBS, the notification system sends ONE email the NEXT time someone posts, but sends no more until you visit the thread again. They had to fix it, because if you left the thread after visiting it, but were still logged in when someone else posted, it didn't send the email.

We used to use BASIC to draw things on the screen with mathematical equations before Microsoft ruined things by inventing Windows. But I haven't been able to afford a programming language that can draw since Microsoft monopolied away everything else.

You need a programming language that can draw, plus the ability to write:

1. The equation for the curve used.
2. Loops to step the placement of the curve.
3. The procedure to draw the image from the equation.
4. A procedure to put the random dots around each point on the image..

You don't have to use different stylesheets for different browsers. I get stuff to work just fine with only one.

The following rules make pages work with all browsers:

- Don't use deprecated tags and attributes.

- Don't use browser-specific tags.

- Make all HTML tags lowercase.

- Be aware that Internet Explorer renders box objects in a different way, compared to other browsers. Don't put nonzero surrounding styles (margin, border, width) in the same tag or style that contains size styles (width, height).

- Make all attributes, values, styles, ids, and classes lowercase.

- Don't tangle tag pairs. Each pair of opening and closing tags must be entirely inside, or entirely outside, every other tag pair in the document.

- Place all attribute values in quotes.

- Don't put line breaks within attribute values.

- Close containing tags with separate closing tags.

- Close empty tags with self-closing tags. Put a space before the / mark. This is necessary to get Internet Explorer to work correctly with closed empty tags.

- Don't use comments to hide scripts or styles from browsers. They cause trouble.

- If you can do so, use styles instead of tables to create columns.

- Don't use tables to create margins, borders, or padding. Use tables to create tabular data.

- Set text alignment styles for tables. The defaults are different for different browsers.

- Write your urls and …

Please realize that placing text on top of an image is not accessible web design. Many people with visual handicaps can not read the text when there is an image under it.

You have tangled tags.

Your font tags are not nested entirely inside or entirely outside the div tags. Tag soup always throws the browser into quirks mode. Quirks mode makes divs go crazy.

You need to align your tags like this:

<div>
  <font>
    <div>
      ....
    </div>
  </font>
</div>

The following does NOT work

<div>
  <div>
    <font>
      ....
    </div>
  </font>
</div>

Also, the font tag is deprecated. Use the div tag or the span tag with CSS instead.

It's not possible at all. That belongs to the user, not to you.

One thing you could do is fill the blank with something using a script, and then let them type over it.

It is not a good idea to use any special character in a filename, because some servers and Internet nodes don't know what to do with them. Stick to the US ASCII letters and numerals.

You forgot that margins, borders, and padding are added OUTSIDE the width and height styles. This makes the inner objects too big to fit in your container if the width percentages add to 100%.

You are designing for the quirks mode of the browsers without the doctype. If you are in quirks mode, the browsers do weird things.

Standard mode puts the surrounding styles (margin, border, padding) OUTSIDE the width and height declarations, so you have to leave extra space for them.

Don't use pixels and points. Use percents and em, so the page is compatible with multiple screen resolutions.

Put the text in a container, and center the container.

Use the w3c page checker.

I hate it when people mess with the history, because I often want to return to the page I came from before I visited that page.

DO NOT change the history. You are affecting things not connected with your site.

Use the blocks to build something.

That is the equivalent of hijacking a website. and is a security violation. It might be illegal.

How do other sites have your images embedded in such a way that you can access them?

Are they doing a link to your image on your site. If so, you can change the url of your picture and the associated link every so often, and put a different image in for the old picture url.

No, because that belongs to the user, not to you.

You also have no control over the screen resolution or the size of the browser window the user opens. A low resolution monitor will display your image much larger on the screen than a high res one will.

Realize that if you could prevent resizing, you make the page not accessible. I know people who resize because they have vision problems.

Please do not put text on top of images. A lot of people can not read text if it is on top of an image, unless the4 image is very very light. Even then, some can't read it. Such a page is not accessible.

There are a number of ways to do this, some more successful than others.

1. You could edit the pictures together into one image with an image editor, and then adjust the size of the picture to fit the width of the browser viewport with the width: 100%; style.

2. Use the big image (maybe with the top image edited in) as the background. Use css relative (%) styles to position the other images and adjust their sizes.

3. Use CSS to position all of the images.

I use multiple classes all the time. As long as they don't contradict each other, it works great.

Use text-align: center; to center text. The margin works on everything else, but not text.

Remember that any surrounding styles (margin, border, padding) are rendered OUTSIDE any size style (width, height) you define. So you need to leave extra room for the surrounding styles to fit into.

Without a doctype, IE goes into quirks mode. Always provide a valid doctype tag.