Boss installed skype.complains it messes up site design

any scripts to 'unskype' a page?

[Weblamer]

Sooo... on our company website, we have our contact info in a nice box in the header. Looks fine.

Well, my boss recently installed skype on his computer. Now, because of skype, the phone numbers on the top of the page sort of pop out and have little flags on them, slightly skewing the clean design of the header. He now things the site design is bad...

So, uh, sort of a stupid question, but is there any scripts or anything i can ad to the site that will tell skype not to pop up little boxes with flags around the phone numbers?

[maximillianos]

It is a plugin that was added to his browser when he installed skype. Go to the plugin settings and you can disable it.

But I would guess your boss isn't going to be happy if you just disable what he installed... =) So perhaps just fix the header to wrap more politely if folks change the font size, etc...

[Philosopher]

There are a few option....

have your boss disable the skype extension...but this won't help other visitors who have this option (which I can't stand).

Change the text to a graphic (super easy to make the graphic look identical to the text).

If you want to keep it as text I've seen a few methods of keeping skype from converting it.

One option is to add < span style="margin-left: -8px;" > < /span > in various places in the phone number. It will add an unbreakable space that doesn't actually show (would likely work just as well using "display:none" instead of the margin-left) but break up the numbers and confuse skype.

Another option I've seen is adding "fax" before the number (again you would likely want to use display:none so that visitors don't see the "fax" term and become confused). Apparently skype won't convert fax numbers.

[Weblamer]

hmm, searchign around a bit, i found this soultion on another site:

==========

By default, the Skype Toolbar will parse each web page and attempt to find phone numbers within the html code. You can prevent this behaviour by "telling" the Skype Toolbar that your site is compatible with Skype. This will stop it from searching for numbers and make it search only for special Skype tags.

Simply add the following meta tag to your page headers,
<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" content="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE" />

Now the Skype Toolbar will only reformat numbers that have special Skype tags. If you have a phone number on your page and you want it to be accessible to Skype users, just code the html using this format,
<!-- sphoneid telnr="[phone]" fileas="John Smith" -->07890 123 456<!-- sphoneid -->

=========