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sduggan
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Post by sduggan »

In the output of my search pages there is the following 2 lines:
<!-- Texis RDBMS Copyright (c) 1992 - 2004 Thunderstone - EPI, Inc. -->
<!-- Texis Web Script Copyright (c) 1996 - 2004 Thunderstone - EPI, Inc. -->

that gets inserted by texis just above the html that I insert into the "top html" field on the search settings page. Is there anyway to remove these lines. For some reason, which I can't figure out anything characters that are placed above the top html which I have inserted really mess up my formatting on the page.

Thanks
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John
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Post by John »

That shouldn't affect HTML formatting. They will not be printed if Vortex is not in HTML mode.
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Shaper
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Post by Shaper »

> That shouldn't affect HTML formatting. They will not
> be printed if Vortex is not in HTML mode.

Not sure what you mean about "HTML mode", but inserting comments in the wrong place in a modern XHTML web page *can* royally screw up the layout.

The problem is that XHTML (unlike HTML 4.x) is derived from XML, and XML is notoriously picky about document structure (this is a feature to ease interoperability, incidentally, not a bug).

(Hugely over-simplified explanation follows ;-)

The issue arises because some browsers (such as IE) have two ways they can render a page - "standards mode", where they interpret (X)HTML and CSS exactly (well, closer to) what the published standards require, and "quirks mode", where they lay out a page more like previous versions of that browser (this was often wildely divergent from the published standards), so as not to break existing websites.

A page which has no doctype is assumed to be HTML 4.x or "XHTML 1.0 Transitional", which is handled in quirks mode by most browsers. A page with a valid XHTML DOCTYPE tag at the beginning is assumed to be valid "XHTML Strict", and is rendered in standards-compliant mode.

Annoyingly, XML (and so XHTML) require that the first element in a document is the DOCTYPE - if Webinator inserts a comment before the DOCTYPE it isn't valid XHTML, and some browsers drop into quirks mode, which causes them to lay out the page "wrongly".

I've heard this bug has been corrected in later versions of webinator, and I'm off to bug the IT guys to download and install the latest free version now to see if it fixes it... ;-)

HTH,

James
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Kai
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Post by Kai »

It hasn't quite been fixed: it is in the pending features list for early 2Q this year though.
Shaper
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Post by Shaper »

Erk, really? So does Thunderstone offer any kind of workaround, or is everyone who's using XHTML (as you're supposed to now) just going to have to live with a nasty-looking page for several months?

I find it hard to believe it's going to take so long to fix - it wouldn't be a complex change to the code, and they should have seen this coming *years* ago. XHTML has always acted like this, and it made a W3C Recommendation in January 2000 - it's not like it's suddenly sprung up on them or anything...

So, anyone have any ideas for workarounds?

Hypothetically I suppose it might be possible to embed client-side Javascript that edits the document object model to remove the comments when the page hits the client. What I'm not sure about is if you can then force a re-parsing of the (modified) page so it'll display as valid XHTML, and even if you can, if it'll work in IE (Firefox/Mozilla and Opera treat the page normally, as valid XHTML).

If I can get anything working I'll post the code here, but it's a long shot at best - why hasn't Thunderstone sorted this already? Granted I'm getting it free, but what about the corporate customers who are paying hundreds of pounds for a broken product?
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John
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