[WEB4LIB] help with FrontPage

[Sheryl Dwinell]

Grace:

>There are no base HREF or meta tags for description and keywords (I didn't
see any way to add these using FP)  and I want to add those.

You can add meta tags in FP98 by going into page properties (right mouse
click on page). Click the Custom tab. You'll see an area at the bottom of
the box that says User Variables. Click the Add button. You'll get a box
called User Meta Variable. Enter name: keywords (or whatever) and value:
whatever values you want (if you use keywords remember to put commas between
each word or phrase). Click ok. If you want to see how it looks in HTML,
click the HTML tab at the bottom of the window. You can also add them by
hand if you want in a text editor, or even easier, by clicking on the HTML
tab.

I don't use the <BASE HREF= > in my own documents, but you can insert one
using FP98. Go into page properties again. Click on the General tab. The
third box down is Base Location. Enter the URL. Again, you can check the
HTML view to see if it works.

>There also is no DOCTYPE and I'm not sure which (if any) version of HTML
FrontPage 98 complies with.

I input the DOCTYPE at the top of all my pages using Homesite, an HTML text
editor. When I open the pages in FP98, the DOCTYPE remains.

> I ran the page through the validator at w3.org and it doesn't validate as
HTML 4.0 Transitional.   Will anything adverse happen if I remove the height
attribute that FP added to a <TABLE> tag?

No.

> I have visions of loosing my whole page if I make changes to it with vi
and then have to pull it back into the FP explorer and editor at some point
to make adjustments to the image map.  Would it be better to pull the page
back into the FP editor now and edit the HTML there?

Hm...maybe you should.  I often edit pages using pico & vi in UNIX with no
ill effects upon opening them again in FP. However, I know that FP98 does
some weird stuff to image maps. Oh, why not edit the html using the HTML
view in FP98? I'm assuming that's why you are going into your server &
editing with vi.

>2.  the alignment of the cells within the table is off when the page is
displayed in two of our small monitors and the color of the graphic
supporting the image map is also wrong.  Is there anything I can do to the
page so that it will display properly in all  monitors.

I looked at your table cells and noticed that you are using percent widths.
This may be playing havoc with the layout on smaller monitors, particularly
if the percent width of the cell containing the image doesn't allow enough
room for the graphic, which would alter the cell next to it. Using percents
for cell widths is disallowed in HTML 3.2 and 4.0, as I recall. You might
want to use fixed widths using pixels in order to ensure that the table
displays the way you want it to on those smaller monitors. Although this
would shorten the width in larger monitors & you might not like how that
looks.  Another suggestion is that you could get away with removing the
table which takes up the contents of the cell in the lower right hand
quadrant. You could just put the contents of that table directly into the
cell. Maybe it's the table within a table cell that is causing the weird
display problem on the smaller monitors.  I'd also suggest that if the PC
from which you are designing is set to 800 X 600 you change the resolution
so you can get a design point of view of the lower resolution monitors.

> I know the color is probably controlled by the settings in the windows
display within the control panel, but automation has locked us out of that
area of those computers.  I'm assuming that I have no control over how the
color will display in Joe Public's monitor if he has it set to a limited
number of colors.

Nope. But, what you can do is try to use 'browser safe' color palettes when
you design graphics. It reduces the number of colors you have to work with,
but at least your colors won't look too funky on PCs using 256 colors.

I viewed your page in Netscape with my screen set to 800 X 600 and I think
it looks great.

good luck,
Sheryl

Sheryl Dwinell
Webmaster/Database Management Librarian
Marquette University Libraries
Milwaukee, WI
414-288-3406
dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu