cleaning up Frontpage code

[Jésus Bleu]

hello,

I have inherited a design job whose previous designer used Frontpage. I use
Dreamweaver CS3.

I noted on inspecting the pages that there was a lot of code which I did not
understand, and the files seemed larger than usual in size (ie, for an
average web-page, almost 200k.

I applied DW's "clean up Word" tool, and the pages were reduced
significantly in size, ie, 40k compared to 200k. Dreamweaver reported things
like removing 160 "[if...]" statements, 90 margin defines, and on and on.
Being not familar with Frontpage's coding system, I am not sure how
necessary this code is. The server we have moved to is Linux-based and does
not offer FP extensions.

This code seems excessively redundant to me, and the "cleaned up pages"
render decently, although will need some tweaking to float the images
properly in the text. The odd thing is that there's still some characters
that show up as squares in IE and diamonds with question marks in Firefox.

Upon inspecting the code in Dreamweaver, there is nothing visible in those
spaces except, simply, "spaces" ... ie, when you press the spacebar. I'm
not sure why IE & FF show a display error.

If anyone could comment, it would be appreciated.

here are the URL's:

old FP-coded page: http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio.htm
page "cleanup" by DW: http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio_CLEAN.htm

thanks for any comments on the "empty space" errors, or on more graceful
conversion of FP to DW-compatible script.

JB

 

[dorayme]

hello,

I have inherited a design job whose previous designer used Frontpage. I use
Dreamweaver CS3.

I noted on inspecting the pages that there was a lot of code which I did not
understand, and the files seemed larger than usual in size (ie, for an
average web-page, almost 200k.

I applied DW's "clean up Word" tool, and the pages were reduced
significantly in size, ie, 40k compared to 200k. Dreamweaver reported things
like removing 160 "[if...]" statements, 90 margin defines, and on and on.
Being not familar with Frontpage's coding system, I am not sure how
necessary this code is. The server we have moved to is Linux-based and does
not offer FP extensions.

This code seems excessively redundant to me, and the "cleaned up pages"
render decently, although will need some tweaking to float the images
properly in the text. The odd thing is that there's still some characters
that show up as squares in IE and diamonds with question marks in Firefox.

Upon inspecting the code in Dreamweaver, there is nothing visible in those
spaces except, simply, "spaces" ... ie, when you press the spacebar. I'm
not sure why IE & FF show a display error.

If anyone could comment, it would be appreciated.

here are the URL's:

old FP-coded page: http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio.htm
page "cleanup" by DW: http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio_CLEAN.htm

thanks for any comments on the "empty space" errors, or on more graceful
conversion of FP to DW-compatible script.

You can't have pictures blocking out text as in the clean conversion
version. See with Firefox.

There is so much wrong, from lack of doctype to character encoding
problems that is hard to know where to begin regarding that particular
URL.

I hate to tell you, either start from nearly scratch in DW or better a
plain text editor. And move over all the needed bits (pics, text etc)
from what you see in the web page as it presents in a browser (copy
paste stuff and drag images off...)

 

[rf]

hello,

I have inherited a design job whose previous designer used Frontpage.

Oh dear.

I use Dreamweaver CS3.

Equally bad.

 

[richard]

hello,

I have inherited a design job whose previous designer used Frontpage. I use
Dreamweaver CS3.

I noted on inspecting the pages that there was a lot of code which I did not
understand, and the files seemed larger than usual in size (ie, for an
average web-page, almost 200k.

I applied DW's "clean up Word" tool, and the pages were reduced
significantly in size, ie, 40k compared to 200k. Dreamweaver reported things
like removing 160 "[if...]" statements, 90 margin defines, and on and on.
Being not familar with Frontpage's coding system, I am not sure how
necessary this code is. The server we have moved to is Linux-based and does
not offer FP extensions.

This code seems excessively redundant to me, and the "cleaned up pages"
render decently, although will need some tweaking to float the images
properly in the text. The odd thing is that there's still some characters
that show up as squares in IE and diamonds with question marks in Firefox.

Upon inspecting the code in Dreamweaver, there is nothing visible in those
spaces except, simply, "spaces" ... ie, when you press the spacebar. I'm
not sure why IE & FF show a display error.

If anyone could comment, it would be appreciated.

here are the URL's:

old FP-coded page: http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio.htm
page "cleanup" by DW: http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio_CLEAN.htm

thanks for any comments on the "empty space" errors, or on more graceful
conversion of FP to DW-compatible script.

JB

Why use bloatware?
I'd just ditch all the unneccessary xml stuff and do it in standard html.
I have no clues what the dozens of "formulas" are for.

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

old FP-coded page: http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio.htm
page "cleanup" by DW: http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio_CLEAN.htm

Dreamweaver has failed you. I agree with dorayme .. push the current FP
work aside and start from scratch.

thanks for any comments on the "empty space" errors, or on more
graceful conversion of FP to DW-compatible script.

That'll be some sort of character encoding error or omission but I do
not wish to wade through that hodge-podge of coding to solve it. :-/

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

I have no clues what the dozens of "formulas" are for.

Use a Microsoft product to make a web page...

 

[Jésus Bleu]

Other browsers may display nothing for an error character, so you don't

notice, because nothing doesn't look that different from a space. Or
maybe when they find they've been lied to and it's not UTF-8 they try
guessing other encodings in ascending order of cluelessness-- i.e.
any encoding whose name starts with "Windows-" first.

So, either convert the page to UTF-8 or configure the server to send the
correct header, whichever is easier.

thanks to all for confirming my deeply-held beliefs that Microsoft's
modus operandi has been pathologically crippled from Day 1, and
that they are incapable of creating anything except useless "bloatware".

And, especially, thanks to Ben C, for an extremely clear, intelligent,
and well presented response. Newsgroups need many more like you.

JB

 

[Andy Dingley]

I have inherited a design job whose previous designer used Frontpage.  I use
Dreamweaver CS3.

It's not that they used FP, it's that they used FP to generate a poor
quality structure.

Throw this away, start again. Scrape the _content_ of the page (Lynx,
wget, clipboard copy from within a browser, regexes over the source)
and paste that into a whole new structure, with whole new CSS.

What FP generates is based on M$oft's impressions of how the web ought
to work, not how it actually works. In particular, the idea of HTML as
a sort of round-trippable Office document, rather than a universal
publishing format to multiple devices. You can't fix that easily, it's
quicker to skin it again.

 

[richard]

It's not that they used FP, it's that they used FP to generate a poor
quality structure.

Throw this away, start again. Scrape the _content_ of the page (Lynx,
wget, clipboard copy from within a browser, regexes over the source)
and paste that into a whole new structure, with whole new CSS.

What FP generates is based on M$oft's impressions of how the web ought
to work, not how it actually works. In particular, the idea of HTML as
a sort of round-trippable Office document, rather than a universal
publishing format to multiple devices. You can't fix that easily, it's
quicker to skin it again.

Not to mention that MS refuses to accept perfectly good CSS and insist that
the rest of the world uses their own creations instead.

 

[Raymond Schmit]

hello,

I have inherited a design job whose previous designer used Frontpage. I use
Dreamweaver CS3.
[...]
Upon inspecting the code in Dreamweaver, there is nothing visible in those
spaces except, simply, "spaces" ... ie, when you press the spacebar. I'm
not sure why IE & FF show a display error.

Those are non-breaking space characters, which ought to look like
spaces but not break lines.

Better to use   for non-breaking space character.
More info -> http://www.htmlbasictutor.ca/non-breaking-space.htm

 

[GTalbot]

hello,

I have inherited a design job whose previous designer used Frontpage.  I use
Dreamweaver CS3.

I noted on inspecting the pages that there was a lot of code which I did not
understand, and the files seemed larger than usual in size (ie, for an
average web-page, almost 200k.

I applied DW's "clean up Word" tool, and the pages were reduced
significantly in size, ie, 40k compared to 200k. Dreamweaver reported things
like removing 160 "[if...]" statements, 90 margin defines, and on and on.
Being not familar with Frontpage's coding system, I am not sure how
necessary this code is.  The server we have moved to is Linux-based and does
not offer FP extensions.

This code seems excessively redundant to me, and the "cleaned up pages"
render decently, although will need some tweaking to float the images
properly in the text.  The odd thing is that there's still some characters
that show up as squares in IE and diamonds with question marks in Firefox..

Upon inspecting the code in Dreamweaver, there is nothing visible in those
spaces except, simply, "spaces" ... ie, when you press the spacebar.  I'm
not sure why IE & FF show a display error.

If anyone could comment, it would be appreciated.

here are the URL's:

old FP-coded page:http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio.htm
page "cleanup" by DW:http://ishdafish.ca/index_files/Ish_Bio_CLEAN.htm

thanks for any comments on the "empty space" errors, or on more graceful
conversion of FP to DW-compatible script.

JB

I believe you first need to clarify the character set. iso-8859-1 I
suggest to use a real and excellent advanced text editor and clean up
the page.

First, remove what's on line 1002:

<span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Comic Sans MS";language:EN-CA'>�</span>

You need to remove all of the bad � characters manually.

Set the character encoding to iso-8859-1; choose HTML 4.01 strict DTD.
I recommend PSPad and a lot of reading.

PSPad 4.5.4 is excellent.

Using HTML Tidy would be perfect in your case.

First thing to remember: FrontPage is very bad and CS3 Dreamweaver is
bad. Best tool is to learn and not to trust 400$ softwares, especially
if you are a beginner. Software development web authoring tools like
DreamWeaver do not compensate absence of knowledge, lack of
experience.

{
The error was: utf8 "\xA0" does not map to Unicode
}

HTML validator: http://validator.w3.org/

good luck, Gérard

 

[Andy Dingley]

You don't have to do it manually. You can just convert the whole file to
UTF-8 using, e.g. iconv -f windows-1252 -t utf-8.

You can't (unless you still have access to the old source). The
documents displayed here are neither ISO-8859-* or UTF-8, they're
content that was one or the other once, was presented and processed as
the other (probably ISO-8859-* to UTF-8), but have since been
"snapshotted" in a way that converts the unmappable octet sequences
into "unmappable character" warning characters. Information has now
been lost, and it's impossible to get it back (except by guessing that
many of them were apostrophes). To fix this, you have to go back to an
untrashed version.

As an editor that's particularly good at handling trashed encodings,
I'd recommend jEdit.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Better to use &nbsp; for non-breaking space character.

There is nothing wrong with using the no-break space as a character, as long
as it is the document's declared encoding.

 

[Raymond Schmit]

There is nothing wrong with using the no-break space as a character, as long
as it is the document's declared encoding.

Correct, however using &nbsp; for non-breaking space character works
always ok - evenwhile the document's declared encoding. is wrong or
inexistant.

 

[Andy Dingley]

There is nothing wrong with using the no-break space as a character, as long
as it is the document's declared encoding.

It's dificult for humans to edit it though, unless you know of an
editor that shows vanilla spaces and non-breaking spaces in some
distinctive manner..

Conversely, it's hard for fluent Russian or Czech speakers to edit a
web page (UTF-8, so encoding isn't a problem) when the non-ASCII
characters have been represented as numeric character entities, rather
than bare characters.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

It's dificult for humans to edit it though,

Yeah, I guess so. I've heard so many odd things about those humans.

unless you know of an
editor that shows vanilla spaces and non-breaking spaces in some
distinctive manner..

Are there other types of editors?? Do you mean those "humans" include
entities that do not edit in Emacs?

Seriously, point taken, but normally you need not know, when editing,
whether a space is a normal space or a no-break space. You just enter the
latter as needed.

Conversely, it's hard for fluent Russian or Czech speakers to edit a
web page (UTF-8, so encoding isn't a problem) when the non-ASCII
characters have been represented as numeric character entities, rather
than bare characters.

Well, yes, and &nbsp; isn't that nice either. Normally when you edit text,
you would like to see the text in a natural way, instead of entity
references.

 

[John Clayton]

-bts
-Four wheels carry the body; two wheels move the soul

Apologies for sharing this with the list,
But I wanted to say how much I liked the sig.file
One day I might claim/ quote it as my own.
If some clown on 4 wheels don't clump me first.
Thank you.
John

 

[dorayme]

Apologies for sharing this with the list,
But I wanted to say how much I liked the sig.file
One day I might claim/ quote it as my own.
If some clown on 4 wheels don't clump me first.

I assume you ride a real motor bike, not just a push bike. The
latter does not do much for the soul up an Australian slope.

(Heard first and then saw a bloke on a push bike with a petrol
motor louder than a lawn mower without a muffler the other day,
no helmet and doing over 60kmh in my local criss-crossing narrow
streets. He was coming back and forth and seemed to be just
testing it! Too fast for me to flag him down to ask about the
power, I liked it!)

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Apologies for sharing this with the list,
But I wanted to say how much I liked the sig.file
One day I might claim/ quote it as my own.
If some clown on 4 wheels don't clump me first.
Thank you.
John

Feel free to quote. I have an unlimited number of copies. <g>
Heh, when I see a 4-wheeler getting too close, I just twist and outrun
the bugger.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Apologies for sharing this with the list,
But I wanted to say how much I liked the sig.file
One day I might claim/ quote it as my own.
If some clown on 4 wheels don't clump me first.

I guess I lost too many friends. I rather carry my body in one piece
with four wheels then release my soul from it with two.