[ - BOM characters]

Notepad++ is the answer to all your BOM pains

 

For some reason, with Dreamweaver (and maybe other editors), the BOM (Byte Order Mark) is introduced when you have not asked it to be... and only on some pages. It's a bug. Problem is, the bug makes your page invalid to W3C standards. The DW validation tool won't pick this up

 

Download and install the free Notepad++.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

 

Whenever the W3C validator throws up the BOM error, just open up the file in Notepad++, click on the 'Format' option, tick 'encode in UTF-8 without BOM' and then save your file. The BOM is taken out and your page is valid again.

[How do I center my website???]

First, create a container box, to put all of your content into (all the other divs.... nav, sidebar, main, footer etc):

 

 

Then create the css:

 

#container {
   width: 976px;
   margin:0px auto;
   text-align:left;
   padding:15px;
   border:1px dashed #333;
   background-color:#eee;
}

 

the main thing is that after you've given the container a width, then the "margin:0px auto;" and "text-align:left;" bits are what makes the site auto-center. the padding, border, color are not needed to auto-center, but help you see where the container box is.

[Why does my site show up differently in IE than in Firefox?]

Best thing is to design for Firefox, and then do fixes JUST for IE, using conditional statements (not as hard as it sounds).... they just tell IE to do something different with some css, so it looks the same as in Firefox. Dreamweaver CS4 uses the Safari engine for it's "live view" iirc.

[CSS Question]

I had a quick look but couldn't make much sense of it... it's just very messy, sorry... probably from the program you did the coding from with all those default div names.

 

If you have Firefox (if not, install it), install the 'firebug' extension and learn how to use it a little. It is great for seeing what's going on with your site. I had a quick look with firebug on the footer (index page), and could see the code you used to get the image for that div. But when I pasted the link to the image ("test/images/something.jpg") the browser wouldn't load up the image for me... just a stripped out version of your index page (just text), so I guess you have some funky javascript going on there.... which makes it hard to check if the image actually exists for me.

 

The html/css could be done alot better btw (great effort for your first time though), to make it easier to understand and also quicker to load and less error-prone and better looking. You have images going 1000 pixels wide, which could easily be just 20px wide and repeating horizontally (and vertically for that grey background image). Once you understand the css box model you'll get it and be able to plan things out better.

For the footer you should create a div just for that eg

copyright blah blah

in the html, and in the css have it auto-centred and with it's own background image or colour. That way it is much easier to put it in any page you want.

 

Best way to learn is read the tutorials/books and also look at the code of other websites (where firebug is excellent).

[tooltip which is safari 2.0.4 happy]

Yeah I know.... awful ancient buggy browser.... but we have to dev for it in the govt on some projects.

 

So, I've been looking for a tooltip that is happy with Safari 2.0.4 .... and had no luck so far.

 

Would prefer it to be able to handle AJAX and therefore load in content from an external html page, but I think this is the main thing Safari can't handle (re-writing the DOM).

 

Cluetip (jQuery) was promising, until we tested it on Safari 2.0.4 and it totally crashed it. It seems most tooltips don't even consider listing what they actually work on (just look at http://plugins.jquery.com/search/node/tooltip+type%3Aproject_project?page=1 for instance).

 

If anyone has any insight, that would be great.

 

If it's a jQuery tooltip, it has to work with jQuery 1.2.6 (as Safari can't handle 1.3x). I'm even willing to consider an alternative framework (mootools etc) if it plays happy with the jQuery 1.2.6 scripts we have running (shadowbox etc).

 

help!