If you care to look.

[Feliks Dzerzhinsky]

This site isn't designed to be pretty. We needed a way that our content
providers could email their information. My colleague provided a way
to strip the content from their email and add it to the respective text
files that are embedded.

The first page at www.paradigm-omega.com is basically on a hosted site
and embeds text from our local server. It also provides a link (the
enter graphic) to www2.paradigm-omega.com. A single similar page is
there, but the links on it are intentionally dead at this time.

I used the W3C validators on it, but my concern is that I may have
missed something else. If anything is seriously broken, let me know.
Then I can fix it before the site goes live.

BTW creating web sites is not my day job, so please keep the laughter at
a reasonable level. ;-)


TIA

 

[Hywel]

This site isn't designed to be pretty. We needed a way that our content
providers could email their information. My colleague provided a way
to strip the content from their email and add it to the respective text
files that are embedded.

The first page at www.paradigm-omega.com is basically on a hosted site
and embeds text from our local server. It also provides a link (the
enter graphic) to www2.paradigm-omega.com. A single similar page is
there, but the links on it are intentionally dead at this time.

I used the W3C validators on it, but my concern is that I may have
missed something else. If anything is seriously broken, let me know.
Then I can fix it before the site goes live.

BTW creating web sites is not my day job, so please keep the laughter at
a reasonable level. ;-)

So, what do you want? A critique of the design? The mark-up? The
structure?

Why have you used <object> for the text file? How does a cell-phone
handle that?

In answer to the question, I'll guard them if you like.

 

[Dylan Parry]

Spake Hywel unto thee:

Why have you used <object> for the text file? How does a cell-phone
handle that?

It *should* display the content between the <object></object> tags, which
in the OP's case is a hyperlink to the text file. What it *will* do is
however an entirely different matter.

 

[Feliks Dzerzhinsky]

Spake Hywel unto thee:


It *should* display the content between the <object></object> tags,
which in the OP's case is a hyperlink to the text file. What it *will*
do is however an entirely different matter.

As far as I can see, on my PC, it *does* display the content of the text
file. On my cell phone, it *does* display a link to the text file which
can then be displayed. The possible problem that may be experienced
from outside our network is that many of the links are still pointing to
local addresses. The reason for this is that I can not view the site
from a "public" IP and have to rely on addresses within our LAN. When
the site goes live, I will change the URLs accordingly.

That said, I am curious as to what you believe it *will* do.

BTW, to save bandwidth, I'll also reply to Hywel here rather than
separately.. A critique on the appearance is no necessary unless you see
something that would inhibit functionality. I know it will not win a
beauty show, but it won't have folks screaming in horror, either. As
far as the code, if you see something that won't work, I'd be glad to
know.

 

[Dylan Parry]

Spake Feliks Dzerzhinsky unto thee:

That said, I am curious as to what you believe it *will* do.

When I said "What it *will* do is however an entirely different matter" I
meant that there is no guarantee that the user agent will act as per the
specifications and present the alternative content to the user - it could
be that a mobile phone will just ignore the element altogether, which is
obviously not a good thing.

 

[Neal]

Spake Feliks Dzerzhinsky unto thee:


When I said "What it *will* do is however an entirely different matter" I
meant that there is no guarantee that the user agent will act as per the
specifications and present the alternative content to the user - it could
be that a mobile phone will just ignore the element altogether, which is
obviously not a good thing.

While it's good practice to work around known errors in UAs, I think it's
a bit much to work around issues that are unknowns.

If a UA doesn't follow the recommendations, and we know what it does wrong
specifically, that's useful. If we know a specific UA will not render
content which should be rendered according to the rec, that's something we
can either accommodate through some means or write off as an error which
makes this UA unsuitable.

So my opinion is that unless someone can provide an example of a UA that
breaks with the object element's normal operation, it's senseless to worry.

That said, somehow including the txt file through PHP might be better than
using object.

 

[Sam Hughes]

So my opinion is that unless someone can provide an example of a UA
that breaks with the object element's normal operation, it's senseless
to worry.

I'd say that even if there is a browser that _does_ break, let's not care
about that either. It is the user's responsibility to get one that can
parse HTML without choking. All that a browser has to do, in this case, is
ignore the object tag completely. If it fails at that endeavor, then stop
calling it a browser, unless practicality impedes.