Forum Moderators: mack
Well, it utterly destroyed my site. Thankfully I had not uploaded these "tidied" pages so I was able to download my site from the server so I once again have a site that while messy and not valid at least functions. All the work I had done this week that was not yet uploaded to the server is of course gone now.
I imagine it is a good program and I simply configured it wrong but I still don't want to use it again. Can anyone suggest an alternative?
I had a client with truly horrendous coding problems and this is what I did: I ran it through the w3c validator and cleaned up the errors one at a time, starting with the alt tags and the invalid attributes all the way down to the funky javascript.
Bit by bit, then checking the "look," continually making backups (naming them like this: 052803-1, 052803-2, 052903-1, etc.).
I'm happy that you had a backup!
I played with the configuration some more, tidied one page, then opened it with Notepad. It looked good. I then opened it in FP and it was a disaster.
I'm too tired. I'll look at it some more tomorrow.
If you are going to "Tidy" the files, you'll probably want to keep those files out of FrontPage afterward, unless you can find a preferences setting that will stop FP from reverting the changes Tidy makes... Hopefully an experienced FrontPage user can point you in the right direction on that. :)
I've been testing it for the last couple of weeks, the XHTML feature, and it appears to work flawlessly. I've managed to validate XHMTL 1.0 Strict and now XHMTL 1.1.
I just took an entire site that was valid HTML 4.01 to begin with (75 pages) and did the conversion in less than 30 minutes. Open each page, do the right click routine, save, preview in browser, validate and then move on to the next page. It's a fairly simple process.
Note: Some things you'll need to fix before validating...
1. You'll need the appropriate DOCTYPE of course.
2. You'll need to remove all instances of border="0" from your images. I've still not found a way to stop FP from doing this. In your external css file put this...
img{border:none;}
That will take care of the border issue.
3. If you are using a javascript image rollover that uses the name="imagename" attribute, you won't be able to validate. I'm waiting to find a fix for that one now.
4. All images must have alt tags. Those that don't justify an alt tag should have an empty alt tag (alt=""), that's two quotation marks side by side, no space inbetween.
5. Of course anything that is deprecated will cause errors and you'll need to fix those.
Those are just a few things so far that I am finding. Oh, you won't be able to use FP's form validation scripts as they don't validate and I've dug through just about every config file trying to find a way to change them to no avail. You'll need to find a validation script that passes validation.
You might want to check out [sourceforge.net...] for bugs and fixes lists.
If I add a date to the filename, then I use the yyyymmdd order for that, as then the filenames will then also automatically sort into the correct date order.
There is a tool to tidy up Frontpage code. I found it at: [webmaster-toolkit.com...]
Whatever you do it should always be fed through [validator.w3.org...] at some point.
