possible bug in page source -- 'buddies' menu item too wide?

[Matthias99]

I'm using Netscape 7, and occasionally, the 'buddies' item in the left-hand side menu will be REALLY wide when I load a page, causing the rest of the items on the page to be scrunched way over to the right. I took a glance at the page source, and noticed that the 'buddies' menu item looks like this:

<div class="ftmessageheaderbar" style="margin-bottom:1px;">
<a href="javascript:winopen('privatebuddy.cfm', 'pmbud', 500,500);" class="ftmessageheadermenulink"><strong>Buddies</strong></a><br>
<div style="margin-top:3px"></div>
</div>

whereas the other items look like this:

<div class="ftmessageheaderbar" style="width:150px;margin-bottom:1px;">
<strong>Favorites</strong><br>
<div style="margin-top:3px"></div>
</div>

That is, they have 'width:150px' in their "style" attribute. Is there a reason this was left off of this item? I think Netscape may sometimes be getting confused and making it a full-width bar instead of just 150 pixels wide.

Incidentally, I don't know WHAT you use to generate your HTML, but it produces some ugly source. There are extra line breaks and tabs everywhere, and it's nearly impossible to read.

 

[Jason Clark]

Matthias, we dont use anything to generate source...its coldfusion that puts in the line breaks as that is application code.

 

[Jason Clark]

Issue addressed.

 

[Matthias99]

Hmm... now the buddies menu is the correct size, but everything is STILL shifted way over to the right. ??? It's like the column containing the menu is a full screen width instead of just being 150 pixels. I don't know what the heck Fusetalk is trying to do there; there's quite a bit of HTML trickery going on with a couple of nested tables. Maybe when I'm at home I'll try loading it into an HTML editor and see if I can figure out what's wrong.

Matthias, we dont use anything to generate source...its coldfusion that puts in the line breaks as that is application code.

Damn. That's pretty ugly output. I haven't used coldfusion much, but I thought its output used to be better than *that*...

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Yeah, what's up with the ridiculous number of line breaks? Why would cold fusion do that? Seems pretty silly.

 

[Jason Clark]

It's always been that way with coldfusion, you can surpress it here and there but thats just the way it is.

http://www.macromedia.com/support/coldfusion/ts/documents/tn17483.htm

At the end of the day though, why does it matter what the source looks like, it doesn't . As long as the output does as it should. I'll try netscape 7 on forums.anandtech.com and see what if i can replicate your issue.

 

[Jason Clark]

I tested page width on Mozilla 1.5 (same as netscape 7), FireFox 0.8 and IE6 all work fine at 1024 on forums.anandtech.com. No horizontal scrolling or issues with the buddy list.

 

[Matthias99]

Jason,

I updated to Netscape 7.1 (the newest version), and now it seems to work fine. I couldn't reproduce it with IE or other browsers either. I was previously using Netscape 7.02, so maybe it was just a bug with that version.

At the end of the day though, why does it matter what the source looks like, it doesn't . As long as the output does as it should.

Yes, but it looks sloppy and is incredibly hard that way. It's like saying "why should I comment and tabify my source code, as long as it compiles and runs properly?" When it *doesn't* work right, it's a lot easier to see what's wrong when the code is actually readable. Just my perspective.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Use mozilla and dom inspector. 😉 Netscape has been abandoned anyways.

 

[Jason Clark]

Matt, i don't think you understand how most application servers interact with HTML when they parse the code within the HTML. The source code to fusetalk is tabbed, intended and extremely clean. We use a full API for our product and have very little business logic anywhere but in the API. Coldfusion "the application server" does the space, tabbing to the outputted html after parsing the code within the HTML.

Hopefully that clarifies it.

 

[Slickone]

Netscape 7.1 is based on Mozilla 1.4 (not 1.5). Netscape 7.2 is 'due' in May and will be based on Mozilla 1.7.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Jason Clark
Matt, i don't think you understand how most application servers interact with HTML when they parse the code within the HTML. The source code to fusetalk is tabbed, intended and extremely clean. We use a full API for our product and have very little business logic anywhere but in the API. Coldfusion "the application server" does the space, tabbing to the outputted html after parsing the code within the HTML.

Hopefully that clarifies it.

Yes, thank you, I understand how it works. I'm just saying that Coldfusion does a lousy job of producing human-readable HTML. But since evidently you don't *CARE* about having human-readable HTML output (and, in a sense, it doesn't really matter, since it is almost always parsed mechanically), this is not surprising.