So, I’ve gotta vent after spending today doing about an hour’s worth of web work. Well, it should have been an hour’s worth of work, but between Macromedia Dreamweaver, Firefox, and the vagaries of HTML, it took pretty much all day.
Bonnie’s Bookstore is launching on Tuesday (still can’t state all details here - press release pending). So I decided to clean up the New Crayon website a bit in preparation for the launch. All I wanted to do was 3 simple things:
1) Fix the left hand column so that the two sidebars there (news and ’submit your e-mail’ for our newsletter), justified at the top of the column, rather than centering (which looked odd on tall pages)
2) Set up a page for Bonnie’s Bookstore
3) Change the main games page to a list of games, featuring Bonnie initially, with room for more later.
If web pages were Word documents, I could have done the above in 60 minutes. But instead, I spent about 8 hours completing these tasks.
The biggest problem is that HTML itself is really odd. It’s hard to arbitrarily carve a page up, and then within each section, align the individual elements as desired. Basically, it comes down to using an HTML construct called a table. But rather than just using a single table, you have to use tables within tables within tables - I think my main page is nested about 5 deep in places. To set up these tables, you have to use various tags <table> <tr> <td> <p>, and for each one, you need a corresponding end tag, in reverse order (i.e. <\p> <\td> <\tr> <\table> Forget an end tag, or invert two of them (I was frequently inverting <td> and <tr> by accident), and Dreamweaver will show you a garbled page, with little indication of what’s wrong. If you’re just a shade unlucky, Dreamweaver will crash, or automatically revert your changes, both of which will wipe out your last 5-10 minutes of work.
In theory, you should be able to use Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG editor to lay this stuff out, but in practice, the editor starts barfing whenever you get your tables nested more than about 2 levels deep.
So instead, you peer through the html source code, hunting for an overlooked < \td> somewhere. But Dreamweaver tends to create code that spills out to roughly column position 300, so you have to scroll your document horizontally as well as vertically. And if you should dare to click anywhere within the WYSIWYG view of your document, the code view will frequently jump to a random position 100 lines away from where you thought you should be looking.
Eventually, you think you have it right, but you can’t really tell, because what you see in Dreamweaver’s preview window corresponds to how it will really look (in Internet Explorer) about as closely as the picture on the TV dinner box corresponds to the mess that emerges from your microwave 6 minutes later. Coincidentally, it seems to take about 6 minutes to get a ‘real’ preview of a page - even though all you want to do is upload a single 20K page to the web to preview it there. But Dreamweaver instead wants to upload your whole web site, and when it does, warns you that various files on the web are newer than the files on your hard drive. That’s not the case, but Dreamweaver is confused because you live in St. Louis and your web host is in Los Angeles, and apparently nobody who works at Macromedia has heard of different time zones, so all your files are out of synch by two hours and it takes about 10 dialog clicks and warnings to finally get your lone 20K page up to the web site where you can see it ‘for real’.
So, after a few iterations of this, you finally guess right and your page looks the way you want it to in Internet Explorer, running from a real live web site. Then, you decide to see how it looks in Firefox - shouldn’t be an issue right?
Wrong, of course. Despite the claims, Firefox is not as good as I.E. It may be more compliant with the ‘official’ HTML standard - it may be less compliant. I don’t really care - all I know is that it’s different, and when one browser is produced by Microsoft and has a 90% share, any other browser that displays pages differently is out of luck. After a few passes to clean up Firefox issues, I give up. You can still see the last Firefox scar - the fact that the two independent boxes on the left side of the page here have thin lines joining them. In I.E., that displays fine, in Firefox, it’s wrong, and at this point, I don’t feel like wasting more time figuring out why.
[edit - two different readers - PJay and former PopTop colleague Dave Deen both pointed out the error in my HTML code causing this Firefox glitch. It's fixed now. Still, html is not for the faint of heart. I've mastered C++ coding for over a decade, and I couldn't spot the error without help from others. And the error only showed up in Firefox, but not I.E. - ahh well...]
So anyways, that’s a very small subset of the issues in trying to put together two pretty simple pages and one sidebar in Dreamweaver. The two new pages will be up this coming Tuesday, when Bonnie’s Bookstore launches.
