Problems getting started with CSS templates

[Erin Paseka]

I got some practice with the CSS Dreamweaver templates at the last meeting, but now I'm having trouble getting started with them in my own directories.

When I followed the instructions on the handout, the resulting shtml page had several problems. http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/csstemp/index.shtml Level 2 navigation is missing, left and right promo images are missing, related links are in default colors, etc. I messed with the URLs but still can't make these elements display properly.

Any idea what's causing these problems? My only theory at this point involves the "_notes" and "Templates/_notes" directories, since they're visible in Windows Explorer but mysteriously invisible in Dreamweaver.

[saltybeagle]

Hey Erin... I took a look at your page...

It looks like apache is sending the incorrect content-type, so browsers are trying to render it as text/xml instead of text/html or application/xhtml+xml. Mozilla 1.7 & later render it as xml very well, but most versions of IE just show the source.

The easy solution, is to remove the xml tag from the top of the source code:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

That tag is optional for xhtml documents, but including it shouldn't change the mime content-type apache sends out.

I'm not sure what configuration in Apache is doing this but I'll check into it and get back here.
Until then, a helpful tip for why pages might render incorrectly.
Sorry about that Erin.

[Erin Paseka]

Wow, I was taking it one browser at a time and hadn't even looked at what awful things IE was doing to it. Firefox at least mostly rendered it correctly.

It all looks fine now that I've taken out that first xml tag. Thanks, Brett!