SSI funnies

aware · January 7th, 2004, 03:58 PM

Hi All

Can I ask you to bear with me on this - I've been developing webs now for 5 years and it would appear I've missed something here. This is how I design sites:-

1. Photshop master
2. Slice Photoshop and create an htm file of the interface
3. cut up htm file into SSI's and recreate with ASP. This is my site page template.

I've used this method for years but this time it won't work and I can't see why.

The problem is the page should fill the screen but doesn't. The tables are set to 100% height & width.

One more thing - Server win2003 and tested on IE6 & N7 all pages display OK in IE5.

Following are url's and a description.

This is the page causing the problem
http://www.ecraft.co.uk/Pages/Site/Default.asp

This page is htm with no SSI's - displays OK
http://www.ecraft.co.uk/Pages/Site/Default.htm

This page uses SSI's but has the shtm extension so used a different interpreter. Displays OK
http://www.ecraft.co.uk/Pages/Site/Default.shtm

Sorry fo banging on a bit but I wanted to explain.

Does anyone have any Ideas
Regards
Andy G

planoie · January 7th, 2004, 04:38 PM

The only thing that I see that's out of the ordinary is that your asp version is spitting this out:
<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%>

Otherwise it looks fine and is identical to the htm version that works. I can't imagine why that would bother the browser renderer.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

aware · January 7th, 2004, 05:06 PM

Thanks Peter

I've fixed it.

The following 2 line are automatically added by Dreamweaver 2004 -

<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Removing them makes the page fill the screen.

Does anyone know why this is.

Andy G

Imar · January 7th, 2004, 05:06 PM

Quote:

quote:Originally posted by planoie
The only thing that I see that's out of the ordinary is that your asp version is spitting this out:
<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%>

Which somehow seems to indicate that the ASP pages are *not* processed by the ASP run-time.

Is the server setup to run ASP correctly?

Imar

---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

aware · January 7th, 2004, 05:41 PM

Hi Imar

The pages must be processed as the includes work as does the data access side of the site.

I commited the cardinal sin of making 2 changes in one pass.

The line which is causing the error is this one -
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

It must be some 'later' browser config. IE 5 is OK with the above line but Ie6 & N7 are not. I'll look around www.w3.org and see what I can get.

Whats nice is that I've not had a 100 replies saying you idiot - call yourself a developer and the answer was easy (OK it was easy) . Maybe there is something here we all need to learn.

Andy G

meow · January 7th, 2004, 06:03 PM

It's because of something lovingly called doctype switching that has been going on for quite some time now. Basically modern browsers have two rendering modes (Except Mozilla that have three). Standards (AKA Strict) Mode and Quirks Mode. In Quirks Mode they emulate older versions of themselves except Opera that emulates IE. *sigh*

Your doctype puts IE6 in Standards Mode. I think removing it is a bad choice, at least without knowing why. Better make your markup work in modern browsers first and hack for old ones second.

I didn't think this was "it" first because as I understood it you had a line of unparsed ASP before the doctype. That would put IE6 in Quirks Mode but I guess I misunderstood you.

Some reading to start5 with:
http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/doctypeswitch.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...hancements.asp
http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/quirks/
http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/doctype/

(o<
//\ =^..^=

meow · January 7th, 2004, 06:09 PM

Where has that edit button gone?

I realize that was a little unclear. What triggers these rendering modes is your choice of doctype or lack thereof. To really simplify, a complete doctype with a URL gives you Standards Mode and a shortform without a URL or no doctype at all give you Quirks Mode.

(o<
//\ =^..^=

Imar · January 8th, 2004, 04:04 AM

Yep, and in the standards compliant mode, IE will not obey to the height="100%" attribute on a table tag, as this is not defined in the standards (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html)

One way around this is to use CSS. You could set a width and height of the <body> and <table> tags to 100% in a CSS file / definition. This works in IE and Opera *with* the doctype:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
  </head>
<body style="height:100%; margin: 0px;">
<table "width=100%" style="height: 100%; border: 1px solid black;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
  <td style="vertical-align: middle; text-align: center">I'm in the middle</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Although Netscape doesn't like the doctype in this example.....

Imar

---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

sideshow245 · March 1st, 2004, 08:55 PM

Does this mean when coding in ASP, we should still declare a doctype like:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

I never have before, but I am trying to have all of my pages comply with w3c standards.

-Darren

planoie · March 1st, 2004, 10:51 PM

This doctype declaration is simply an HTML document type declaration. It tells the browser about the document, what standards it *should* conform to and how to display the elements of the page based on that standard. It really has nothing to do with ASP, just the resulting HTML.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.