Corrente

If you have "no place to go," come here!

Can people please help out Avedon at Sideshow?

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 1:22pm

There's some weird issue on her site where people sometimes see garbage, and sometimes don't (previous discussion here). So, readers, will you please click here, and say whether you see garbage there in comments here (since if the page is garbage, you won't be able to leave comments there), and give your browser and your operating system, with versions?

For example, Firefox 3.2.6, OS X 10.4.11. Maybe that will give enough data for Avedon to track the problem down.

And if you wouldn't mind returning to that same link later, and also posting that result, that would be great. Because from the discussion, sometimes it's garbage and sometimes it isn't.

0
No votes yet

Comments

CMike's picture
Submitted by CMike on

Google Chrome 17.0.963.56 m

My OS on this computer is Windows Vista Home Basic 6.0 (Build 6002: Service Pack 2)

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

1. Raw HTML ("garbage") in Safari (I still see this)

2. No comment link (but a vertical bar |). I see this now. Maybe it's intentional on the posts that are single pages, but don't think so.

Submitted by Avedon on

The "|" is what I see when I don't allow Active X. I routinely ignore Active X when I look at my own pages before I post them (unlike Haloscan, Echo is not live before it's posted, so it doesn't work), so I see it all the time. But my browser doesn't ask me whether to allow Active X when I actually look at the page online, so I see the comments instead.

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on

I'm running Win7 Professional and have no problems with either Firefox 10.0.2 or IE 9.0.8 64-bit, but Chrome just shows the underlying HTML code without rendering it.

coyotecreek's picture
Submitted by coyotecreek on

MAC OS X 10.6.8

shargash's picture
Submitted by shargash on

I'm using Win 7, IE 9.0.8112.16421. This is a pretty new PC, and I haven't got around to loading any other browsers yet.

BillF's picture
Submitted by BillF on

Under Ubuntu Linux, Chrome 17.0.963.46 the underlying HTML source is displayed (i.e. garbage) while Firefox 10.0.2 renders it OK. But, the HTML is badly broken. The creator needs to run the page through a validator (e.g. http://validator.w3.org/ ) and start fixing the reported problems. Some of the errors are probably somewhat benign, but there's little doubt that something's seriously amiss with the HTML.

Submitted by Avedon on

I don't even understand the errors it's flagging.

I know how to do simple code, which is what most of this is. I have no idea why it's saying it can't detect the docoment type when it has the HTML tags, except that it's claiming "<" as an illegal character! How can that be?

I'm just as confused about the rest - all of this stuff has been working as long as I've had the pages up, and suddenly it's "illegal". This is all pretty simple HTML crap except for a couple of pieces of code I use for things like comments and such.

And I don't understand how the archive page can be broken for people when the front page isn't, since there's more stuff on the front page, but there is *nothing* on the archive page that isn't on the front page.

It will take a better coder than me to figure out what's wrong.

BillF's picture
Submitted by BillF on

Every HTML page must have a DOCTYPE declaration. See here: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_doctyp... . Some of the errors you're seeing may have to do with your failure to supply one.

The style tag must occur within the head section and it must be a single tag set containing all the specifications you wish to apply within the body of the document. It's possible to assign a style within a span tag within the body, but that's different from the style tag per se. See:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_style.asp .

Oftentimes badly written (i.e. unparsable) HTML will render properly. The trouble is, when it does "break" such coding can be a veritable nightmare to debug.

On Edit:

A proper stylesheet would look like this:

[style type="text/css"]
  .blackout {background-color: black; color: black;}
  .i hope {background-color: green; color: red;}
  .reverse {background-color: black; color: white;}
  .silly lawsuit {background-color: black; color: orange;}
  .highlight {background-color: pink; color: black;}
  .highlight2 {background-color: yellow; color: black;}
[/style]

(Replace "style" square brackets with angle brackets )

editor_u's picture
Submitted by editor_u on

I see that you've gotten the same results I have with Safari 4.1.3 and Firefox 3.2.6 ( Mac OS X 10.4.11). This morning, Avedon's site is still behaving as I described yesterday. I did not, however, describe the comment problem at that time (mainly because I had not completely explored it yet).

Today, if I go to The Sideshow home page, in either browser, at the end of each entry I see the comment link and the permalink (as a time stamp) below it. In both Safari and Firefox, clicking the comment link brings up the comment window (remember we're on the home page, not the single entry page).

Clicking the permalink, in Safari, I still get HTML code, and in Firefox, as before, I get the page rendered correctly.

But on the single page, Firefox does not show the comment link. It shows that "|" symbol, as you described, above. Strange that the comment link does appear on the main page in both browsers, but not on the single page in Firefox (and, of course, one cannot see the comment link in Safari, because all one gets is the HTML.

Now, I don't know whether this helps at all (I am clueless regarding Javascript), but in the raw HTML for the single page, I see some code immediately following the final words of the post ("…but I don't know.") that looks like it is supposed to bring up the comment window. I can't post the code here, because it does not render as text (I've sent it to you (Lambert) in plain text). (The next bit of code after that seems to be for the permalink, though I haven't looked as closely at it.)

I do note that the (comment) code in question seems to be identical on the home page and the single page, but produces a link on the home page and just an "|" on the single page. Perhaps I'm not seeing straight yet (only one cup of coffee so far), and I've missed something. Even if my observation is correct, though, I don't know that it means anything at all. You really shouldn't let amateurs play with HTML (or Javascript).

Submitted by Avedon on

[bracket]HTML[bracket] was simple. It's an HTML page, it says HTML, the end.

The whole idea of adding the DOCTYPE may have been introduced some time in the last ten years, but the HTML tag has always been enough.

So, possibly, introducing this requirement has broken my nice, clean, vanilla code for some browsers, although IE and Firefox seem to be perfectly happy with what I've always been using.

And I'm not entirely sure which DOCTYPE I should choose, nor what any of the stuff in the DOCTYPE examples means.

And it still doesn't explain why the front page works but the archive page doesn't.

[BTW, there is no single-entry page. The anchor links in the individual posts go to the archive page for that month. It's only a single-post page when that post is the first one of the month. And then there are two posts on it, and then there are four, and then..."]

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

Ten years ago a "naked" HTML tag was OK; now there has to be a DOCTYPE line. See here or here.

Or, to put this another way, the system was getting away with something; the doctype line should have been there long ago.