HTML Coders--HELP!

[Gr8Kat]

I don't know a lick of HTML code. I hope to go to school and learn one of these days, but in the meantime I'm using Netscape Composer. However, sometimes when I try to insert an HTML tag, I get the error message "Premature Closure of Tag." What does this mean and how do I fix it?? Can anyone help or should I just look for "HTML for Dummies"?

Thanks :)

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"I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it," Jack Handy

[falcon2]

I'm not familiar with the nutscrape tools, but I'm going to take a wild crack and say you've forgot to close quotes before you close the angle iron. (hope this turns out)
wrong: <A HREF="www.nowhere.com >
right: < A HREF="www.nowhere.com" >
OR you have improperly nested tags
wrong: <FONT COLOR=RED><B>text</FONT></B>
right: <FONT COLOR=RED><B>text</B></FONT>

[Gaudere]

Sounds like you're closing your tag (your closing tag looks like your beginning tag, only with a / in front of it, like <b> </b>((I'm assuming you don't know *anything* about HTML so don't be offended)) before you put anything in it. So all you have to do is put something inside the tag to make it happy, like this <b>hi!< /b> It sounds like a warning more than a problem with your code. I haven't used Netscape Composer, though. You young'uns...I used to write my code in Notepad! And I had to walk uphill both ways to school, too! ;)

Hoping the codes work on this message...

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"Eppur, si muove!" - Galileo Galilei

Could be any of the above or maybe something else. Why don't you post here some of what you've coded.

[GuanoLad]

It might be (what the hey, lets confuse him even more) that you have a close tag for something that hasn't got an opener.

I hate all these wysiwyg tools that say "even you, a total loser that talks to his mouse, can make a professional looking webpage!" which is a total LIE!

Okay, so I'm a web designer who handcodes, okay? ;)

[Nickrz]

(Gasp) You had notepad? I used to write my code with edlin!

[lovelee]

(Gasp) I had to learn vi before I even *got* to do HTML code! You lucky bastard.

lovelee

[Danny]

(Gasp) You mean you guys never had to learn to use an IBM punch card machine? Or even a paper tape reader? What are they teaching these days, my god!

[AuraSeer]

They let you use vi? Ha, slacker! All I got was a bank of toggle switches and a wall full of lights. ;)

[tomndebb]

Toggle switches and a wall full of lights would be easier to use than vi. feh

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Tom~

[Gr8Kat]

I haven't coded a single thing, that's the problem. I really don't know any HTML, I just "borrow" it from other sources (that say, cut and paste the HTML below; I ain't a plagariser!). Sometimes it works great, and sometimes I get this "error" message.

Anyhoo, the bit of code that's giving me fits this time is at http://www.ida.net/users/elaine/pedigre2.htm

To me, it all looks totally incomprehensible. Is this the wrong forum to ask for a crash course in coding, or should I just buy the aforementioned "Dummies" book?

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"I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it," Jack Handy

[Gaudere]

Can you link us to the page you have put your code in? I C&P'ed the code from the pages you linked to and it worked fine for me. You may have accidentally deleted a bit of it.



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"Eppur, si muove!" - Galileo Galilei

[AWB]

Gr8Kat: I don't know a lick of HTML code. I hope to go to school and learn one of these days, but in the meantime I'm using Netscape Composer.

Try this site to learn HTML, Perl, and all sorts of other things about Web programming:
The Web Developers' Virtual Library (http://www.wdvl.com/)

[Gr8Kat]

Can you link us to the page you have put your code in? I C&P'ed the code from the pages you linked to and it worked fine for me. You may have accidentally deleted a bit of it.

Netscape Composer won't let me add the tag to my page until whatever it is that it perceives as a problem is fixed. I've tried recopying and repasting the code, but I keep getting the "premature close of tag" error. And Netscape is bound and determined to not let any "errors" be pasted in, even if maybe I want them there.

GuanoLad said:I hate all these wysiwyg tools that say "even you, a total loser that talks to his mouse, can make a professional looking webpage!" which is a total LIE!

Yeah yeah yeah, bite me :)

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"I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it," Jack Handy

[Gaudere]

You can email me the code if you like; just C&P it into an email. sburch@pcquote.com. But first try pasting it into Notepad (in your "accesories") and save it as foo.html or whatever, and open it in your browser. It may be a problem with Composer and not your code. I suspect, though, that the problem is that your are pasting a page within a page, and that is what is the problem. If you have two </HTML&rt; and </body&rt; tags in your page, delete the first one.

If you want to learn what you're doing, I recommend picking up a quick start HTML book. I hate online tutorials.

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"Eppur, si muove!" - Galileo Galilei

[Gr8Kat]

You can email me the code if you like; just C&P it into an email. sburch@pcquote.com. But first try pasting it into Notepad (in your "accesories") and save it as foo.html or whatever, and open it in your browser.

Hey, yeah, that worked.

It may be a problem with Composer and not your code. I suspect, though, that the problem is that your are pasting a page within a page, and that is what is the problem. If you have two </HTML&rt; and </body&rt; tags in your page, delete the first one.

Yeah, that could be, I'm just going to have to use notepad. But now I have another question; sometimes the code I'm trying to insert isn't for a whole new page. Like the code on this page:
http://www.wunderground.com:88/geo/InfoboxBannerPromo/US/OR/Dallas.html

This is something I want in an existing page, and I still get the "premature close of tag" error. Am I just going to have to resign myself to a weatherless home page?

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"I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it," Jack Handy

[Gr8Kat]

Thanks everyone for your help! By fiddling around and inserting the code in Notepad, then sending it back to Netscape Composer, I was able to do some of the stuff I couldn't do before :) Thanks again for the advice!

I may learn how to do this for real yet :)

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"I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it," Jack Handy

[Louie]

If you need more help, check out the the HTML tutoral (http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/000194.html).

[GuanoLad]

See? I wasn't picking on you, Gr8Kat, I was picking on things like Frontpage and Composer, that present you with the illusion that you are creating a webpage, when really it's making a mess of things that needs constant cleanup.

[Nickrz]

Claris Homepage does a pretty good job without any dicking around with html.

Well, not in my experience. Too many (DIV)s and (TH)s etc. which are totally redundant tags. Though worse than that was, a friend of mine who had only ever used Claris for her web design was so sadly ignorant of too many of the basic tags, just because they weren't available as options on any of the program menus. Things like aligning images, and column spans and stuff.

Anyhoo, having said that, I understand Frontpage 2000 isn't so bad these days; much better than its earlier incarnations.

(Someone cleaned this up for him)


[Note: This message has been edited by Nickrz]

[GuanoLad]

Ah shit, who turned the HTML code on in this doggone forum?

Sorry! Can someone clean that up for me?

*shucks*

[JoeyBlades]

GuanoLad wrote (very peculiarly):


Anyhoo, having said that, I understand Frontpage 2000 isn't so bad these days


Don't you believe it. I tried it about a month ago, believing the advertisements that claimed that it didn't monkey around with your html code... big lie! Everytime it hit a tag that it didn't understand it freaked out in it's formatting in the wysiwyg display plus transformed my html into something completely unrecognizable. Of course, Netscape Composer always rewrites my code.

I'm a hand-edit kind of guy and have been for a long time. I use Alpha on the Mac which has lots of built-in html tools (including a web-lint which does some basic syntax checking and detects missing or superflouous tags) and makes hand editing nearly painless. I also have a handful of homegrown perl gizmos that make certain things easier. The only reason I tried FrontPage was because I was using a Windoze platform and I couldn't find anything comparable to Alpha. I've tried lots of wysiwyg html editors and none of them have been worth a damn, though I do admit that I sometimes use Netscape Composer to build very complex (nested) tables, then cut & paste the relevant html code into my target code (after a bit of dusting and cleaning).

Call me a nerd or a snob or both, but the best web pages are coded by hand! This is because you can do things in raw html that you can't do in even the best wysiwyg html editors.

[Gaudere]

Yay for handcoders! I'll admit I use FrontPage sometimes, but then I have to go into the raw HTML anyway to clean it up. Ye Gods, the sheer proliferation of font tags! I've had *three* font tags pop up, modifying an *empty space*. But it's nice for tables. I use HomeSite at work, which is nice if you turn off the automatic tag closer thing. You can't beat handcoding for clean code that's as fast to download as possible.

Gr8Kat, of you just want to stick in that snippet of code, it can go anywhere in an existing page (well, anywhere that doesn't break up a tag or move around stuff you want to stay where it is).

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"Eppur, si muove!" - Galileo Galilei

[tanstaafl]

For those of you who hand-code your html, there is a really good html editor called EZPad. I found it on download.com. It's freeware. It is an editor that lets you hand code your html (with automatic &gt generation and wizards for things like tables and imagemaps). It also has a tab you can click on to show you what your page will display as. (You can't edit in the display mode, but it is easy to flip back and forth.) Best of all, its free!

I think it is only for Windows though... I don't know of anything for Mac or Linux.

(Oh yes, I have nothing to do with the people who make EZPad. I just thought some of you may be interested.)

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"You can't run away forever; but there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start." --- Jim Steinman

Dennis Matheson --- Dennis@mountaindiver.com
Hike, Dive, Ski, Climb --- www.mountaindiver.com (http://www.mountaindiver.com)

[Nickrz]

Guano, you missed my point. Claris does a good enough job if you don't want to fool around with html. Why worry about redundant tags if you're not looking at them? And why worry about being ignorant of html coding if you didn't want to fool around with it in the first place? That's the whole purpose of a GUI.

[JoltSucker]

It looks like GuanoLad ran into the same problem that I've run into here in posting HTML. The HTML looks great in VisualPage and Netscape, but when you paste it into the reply window and hit "Submit Reply", the formatting goes all to hell. I think UBB's handling of HTML is not ready for primetime. I had posted a table, and while the table itself looked fine, it was preceeded by serveral pages of blank screen. VisualPage inserts a lot of blank lines and indents to make the HTML readable, but I think UBB interprets them as spaces.

[GuanoLad]

Thanks for fixing my mess, Nickrz. :)


I think the fact that some important formatting tags not being available to
a Claris user is significant enough, especially when it comes to aligining
images for text flow.


But I'm a handcoder using Homesite (for Mac users, that's a program much
like BBEdit) and I feel so much happier knowing what I'm doing, including
code on a page that I know I put in myself, and having handy gadgets like
the extended find and replace, or the drag and drop images.

[JoeyBlades]

Nickrz asks:


Why worry about redundant tags if you're not looking at them?


If you're just working with small html files where the pages are only accessed a few times a day, then you're right - superfluous tags are of no consequence. If, on the otherhand, you're dealing with rather large html segments and you're getting 1000's of hits a day, the extra crap that wysiwyg editors throw in can impact performance in a measurable way.

[moriah]

Gr8Kat,


Once you open the insert HTML box, and click on help, it will tell you how to do it.&nbsp; In a nutshell, you don't put the whole HTML phrase in the box, you only put one open and close bracket expression
at a time.&nbsp; For example, if I wanted to italicize a word, say foo, I would type in the box:


&lt;i>


and then close the box (click OK).&nbsp;&nbsp; Then I'd type foo in the regular text screen.&nbsp; Then I'd open the insert HTML box again and type


&lt;/i>


and click OK.&nbsp; Each element of a coded phrase gets its own box and icon.


But, of course, it would be easier to simply highlight foo and hit the italics button.&nbsp; In the same way, it's easier to highlight the phrase you want to be a link and choose Insert Link.


Peace.