[519] in IS Home Pages
Netscape 3 issue: workaround
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin M. Cunningham)
Wed Apr 7 13:11:12 1999
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 13:09:26 -0400
To: is-home@mit.edu
From: "Kevin M. Cunningham" <kcunning@MIT.EDU>
Cc: kcunning@mit.edu
Howdy fellow is-homemakers,
Regarding the problem Dennis reported, I have found a workaround.
(These principles were discovered in solving the problem with the files in is/services, most especially list.html, but they apply generally.)
[BTW, I fixed list.html; to see the old version, see list-old.html]
PROBLEMS/WORKAROUNDS
1) First of all, someone seems to have edited the file in Claris Home Page with the "include </P> tags" option selected. This causes several bad-looking results when viewed in Netscape 3 - basically extra paragraph spaces around the top menu part, and also around the horizontal rules down in the main part of the doc. (If you look at the corresponding menu part in the index.html file, you'll notice that it does NOT have </P> tags - and looks fine in Netscape 3.)
The suggestion here of course is to turn "include </P> tags" off.
2) Regarding the anchor point problem, first let's review the code. A typical block of code for the anchor points looked something like this:
<TD COLSPAN=2>
<P>
<HR>
<A NAME=sales></A></P>
</TD>
Just removing the final </P> tag does not solve the link problem (although it does eliminate an extra paragraph white space in Netscape 3, as noted above).
The paragraph tagging is unnecessary in any case, strictly speaking, but is added by Claris Home Page. If we eliminate it completely from the cell, we have:
<TD COLSPAN=2>
<HR>
<A NAME=sales></A>
</TD>
Unfortunately, this does not solve the problem. However, if we reverse the order of the elements, everything seems to work! --
<TD COLSPAN=2>
<A NAME=sales></A>
<HR>
</TD>
The logic seems to have something to do with Netscape 3 completing the tag structure silently, and throwing out the link for some reason. At first I thought it had something to do with silently adding a </P> before the <HR>, but now I'm not really sure what Netscape 3's doing. Regardless, putting the link code (<A NAME=...>) BEFORE the <HR> code seems to fix things in Netscape 3 (and work fine in later versions too...) (In "the old days", we used to put the anchors in as <A NAME="foo"><HR></A>, which worked as well, but Home Page can't accept such a tag structure.)
CONCLUSION
My suggestion, then, is to revise our code in two ways:
1) turn off automatic </P> when editing the file.
2) place the anchor code BEFORE the <hr> code in each case.
That should make the file usable in netscape 3.
I have actually done this with list.html, but my changes will probably be overwritten the next time someone edits the file using Home Page. If you follow the above guidelines, the result should be okay.
Of course, these principles should guide all our revisions, as they apply generally to files viewed in Netscape 3.
(One other note of advice: if you try to review revisions using Netscape 3, be sure to leave the page and flush your cache completely before you look at the revised version. I found Netscape 3 tenaciously holding onto the older versions even when I used Reload...)
--Kevin
