Re: items re Amaya 8.8.51

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Hi, Irčne --

Thank you. You wrote a month-plus ago.

You wrote:
* * * * *
The better way to generate spaces between paragraphs
is to use CSS rules like p {marging-top: 2em}
* * * * *

Alas, <p> skips a entire line between paragraphs,
which is too much, and positive margin-top just adds
to it, so I use <br />, a slew of &nbsp; entities to
indent, and spacer graphics.

But, thanks to your suggestion, I discovered that
negative margin-top might help. I tried -1em; it
looked pretty good in IE5, Firefox 1.5.0.5, & Opera 9
but causes paragraphs to touch in Amaya. That's too
variable, but it might be interesting in the future.

Apart from that, I try to be consistent with the
performance of older browsers, to a limited extent, so
more people can access my site as intended.

You wrote:
* * * * *
.. . . you could understand that an image without
alternate information is disturbing. If your image is
just a space, just say that it is a space alt=" ".
* * * * *

Yes. I've since added alt="" (rather than alt=" ",
since the spacers are zero pixels wide, although I
don't know if that makes a difference). I had
forgotten alt= was required and not just recommended.

I and you wrote:
* * * * *
3. A progress bar for page loading would be useful. .
.. . Each of these <img> tags took roughly 5-6 minutes
to write (it paints <img> tags in 2 passes but the
first pass may be quick before it unpaints them and
paints them again). There should be 138 of the tags,
which comes to roughly 11 1/2 hours to closer to 14
hours [to load the page]. . . .
* * * * *
I'm curious to check this page. Could you send me a
pointer.
* * * * *

I've since revised it, I don't have the old version
(which may have been HTML), and now Amaya won't load
the new one (XHTML) past the head, although it works
in IE 5 & 5.5, Opera 8.54, Firefox 1.5.0.4, and I
think Lynx and IE6.

I doubt I can reconstruct the old page version, since
I probably changed the prologue and other things, but
thanks for being curious. The main distinguishing
characteristic that occurs to me is that it has a huge
run of text with many paragraphs (it isn't optimized
for Google searchers).

You wrote:
* * * * *
In your case, I suggest you "discard" errors.
Amaya will try to fix a maximum of errors then you
could save 
the fixed document with "Save As" either as an HTML or
as an XHTML document.
* * * * *

I ran documents through Amaya after writing, since I
prefer writing on my Win95a/Notepad/IE5.5/RAM32MB
platform and then testing in other browsers, but if I
could figure out what error Amaya is reporting it
would be more useful. I ran a page through Amaya for
which it reported </head> as a mismatched tag, even
though <head
profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/">
precedes it some lines above and the only elements in
between are title, base, link, comment, & meta. So I
don't know what's mismatched.

One meta element is a necessity and is defined by
Microsoft, so I hope that's not the problem, yet it
may be. Here it is from my XHTML, as tested two ways:
  <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing"
content="TRUE">
  <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing"
content="TRUE" />
The one with the slash at least lets Amaya display
source and PARSING.ERROR, albeit leaving the browser
window blank. (PARSING.ERROR lists many items in the
CSS Amaya is ignoring but only one error in the page:
</head> as mismatched.) However, the one without the
slash (as directed in online instructions about the
SmartTags problem) causes Amaya to quit without
notice. (Both loadings are via the force-character
command in the File menu, using 8859-1, despite the
UTF-8 declaration in the file. Another file, also
without the slash, loads the same way as the file now
under discussion.) I'm going to insert the
space-and-slash in that tag (all my other tags have
required slashes) in all my pages, since they still
display properly in IE, Opera, and Firefox, even if
they block displaying in Amaya. But I wonder if Amaya
is ignoring non-well-formed XHTML meta elements but
crashing on a meta element defined by Microsoft, or if
the problem is the capitalization of the content value
(also apparently required).

(If you're unfamiliar with the SmartTags problem, it's
that Microsoft decided to offer links to websites
based on what a user is viewing. As a website owner
and designer, I want to decide what links are attached
to my site, especially if people are confused into
thinking they're my links. I doubt Renault would like
all the visitors to its website to be sent to
Cadillac's website, or to a bicycle maker's site. The
public response to Microsoft led Microsoft to offer a
tag that would suppress SmartTags, provided we insert
their tag into all of our pages. I suppose the tag
only has to work in IE, but I'm not sure of that; it
depends on who else has SmartTags technology. Notably,
the solution is offered on non-Microsoft sites, not at
www.microsoft.com, so the lack of the slash may just
be non-Microsoft sloppiness that I shouldn't have
copied literally.)

I'm glad if Amaya is simply stricter than other
browsers. As I read your comments, I guess the issue
is usability of Amaya: whether Amaya's critiques are
clear to designers whose skills range across the lot.

You wrote:
* * * * *
Alt-space-x is not an Amaya shortcut.
Shortcuts are displayed in menu entries.
* * * * *

I think it's called the service menu, and maybe it's
from a Win API. It's in the top left of the main
window's title bar, and that menu displays the "x"
shortcut for the maximize command. All its commands
work via the mouse, and they display their shortcuts,
so users who know about the menu will usually expect
them to work. Alt-F4, which is in the same menu, also
works. So the issue is with alt-space, which should
open the menu but instead crashes the browser with an
illegal-operation error. When I tried it lately on my
laptop, the error details said that Amaya "caused a
stack fault in module KERNEL32.DLL at 0167:bff7429f."
I'll leave interpreting that to you. I don't know
enough.

You wrote:
* * * * *
& are not allowed within element and attribute values.
You should us &amp;
You seem to write HTML by hand without knowing
constrains of this language.
* * * * *

Oops -- I blew it. Anyway, I replaced those ampersands
a while back with plus signs and that worked. I mostly
know the constraints but doubtless forget one now and
then.

I write by hand so I can see what's happening. I have
an office suite that converts into HTML but I don't
know everything it does when I give a command and I
don't always like the automated results, so I write by
hand.

The oddity was that Amaya reported some ampersands as
errors but not others within the same values, even
though none were being used to begin character
entities. That's a consistency issue within Amaya.

You wrote:
* * * * *
The "Force character coding" command is just here to
reread a loaded document 
when it's not readable with the current document
encoding.
See "Note about character sets" in Help > Browsing 
* * * * *

The note says I have to declare it, such as UTF-8 via
a meta in an XHTML document. I have:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html"
charset="UTF-8" />
But I still have to force it as 8859-1.

Newly discovered problem: When I edited a tag in
Amaya's source window and saved, it also replaced all
the white space in the file. The file when renamed to
*.txt reads normally in WordPad but Notepad shows it
as one long paragraph, with missing-character symbols
where the Enter key had been used before Amaya's
editing.

The site I'm designing is
<http://www.treesintheForest.net> and the page with
the longest text, an earlier version of which needed
14 hours to load in Amaya but now mostly won't load,
is
<http://www.treesintheForest.net/terms-of-use-of-websites.html>.
If you do explore the site, much is temporarily hidden
from public perusal; for that, see
<http://www.treesintheForest.net/draft-beta-67253/>.

Thank you kindly for your discussion and work.

-- Nick


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Received on Wednesday, 16 August 2006 10:26:57 UTC