Only half the page rendering

but everything is there in the source code

[monkeythumpa]

I have a page that sends the correct source code, but the most important content is not rendering unless you go to another page and then hit back. When I view the source code it is there but even after a refresh it is missing. I remember a problem like this came through the forum before but I can't find the post. Anyone experience this? I can send you the url if you are curious.

[Hester]

Are you using IE/Win?

[monkeythumpa]

Sorry, it seems to only happen on Firefox. It happens on XP home and pro.

[tedster]

Sorry if this seems overly basic, but does the page validate?

[monkeythumpa]

Well kinda, it does if you ignore all the missing alt tags for images and ad javascripts, even with the ads disabled I am having this problem.

[tedster]

OK - those don't affect rendering, so I would start removing page elements (working with a copy of the page) and see where the problem vanishes. Try ro reduce it to the barest code needed to make the rendering problem show up.

[monkeythumpa]

yeah, I guess that is what I have to do. I was hoping for a silver bullet. Thanks.

[Lorel]

Sounds like a missing closing tag. Don't just rely on W3C for validation as it doesn't catch all the closing tags. I've even seen it miss a missing HTML tag and closing li tags etc. I use Elsop as a backup.

[encyclo]

You can sometimes get this problem when using badly-conceived CSS positioning (absolute positioning or float). If you are using CSS you should check that all the elements of the page are showing when the stylesheet is disabled.

Don't just rely on W3C for validation as it doesn't catch all the closing tags. I've even seen it miss a missing HTML tag and closing li tags etc.

Sounds normal: in HTML (not XHTML) the HTML and closing li tags are optional. :) You can get in to trouble, however, with tables with missing

</td>

or

</tr>

tags - again, these are theoretically optional in HTML (so the problem won't show up when validating) but especially old Netscape browsers can have big problems with this: Firefox mostly has this fixed but you should always use them to be sure.