I've been asked by a friend, who created a very visually appealing website mostly in Dreamweaver, to add some database backed functionality that I really only know how to do in ASP.NET. The problem is when I load his generated HTML into an ASPX page it renders it quite horribly. I've tried adding a basic .html page to an ASP.NET project but it still looks funky. He's on a Mac and i'm (obviously) using a Windows box. Is there a clean way to take a quite complete (but quite static) website and add ASP.NET functionality to it? Any comments are very much welcome. Thanks!
Just a quick thought.
You state in your comment:
Everything works is just doesn't look near as good as it did in the Safari browser
Where doesn't it look as good as it did in the Safari browser? When served as a page from a webserver (either the built-in cassini server, or IIS) in IE/Firefox, or when you switch to design view in Visual Studio?
Visual Studio has a lot of trouble rendering things correctly - it's really not standards compliant by anyone's definition - VS2010 is apparently much better - for example, try looking at this page: display/box/float/clear test in a browser and in the VS designer - very different.
If you mean in the browser, which browser? Have you tried looking at it Firefox instead? It's possible that if it's been built to look nice in Safari that it will work in Firefox, but there may be issues with the rendering/layouts in IE - this is a fairly well known issue.
If all the stylesheets are being correctly called (check with Firebug for Firefox for example) then there are probably some issues with the CSS that need to be addressed for IE.
ASP.NET does not alter the rendering of standard HTML. So there must be some other issue like a missing stylesheet (either all together or a broken link) or images. Once you have the HTML properly copied over and solve the display issue, you can add in the ASP.NET controls and code you need to make it functional.
Related
My web applications are designed in IE6 compatibility mode. Now I need to migrate to IE8, but most of my web pages are not in good allignment in IE8 browser. First I tried the compatibility view in IE8(the button near the address bar), but of no use. Then as per somebodies suggestion I have added the meta tag '' in the section of every html pages, but still it is not working. I am using Windows XP professional OS version 2002 with service pack3 and IIS version 5.1. I am not sure I can migrate to IE8 with this system configuration. Moreover I am a beginner in this session. Could somebody please explain how can I acheive this?
Thanks in advance,
Lakshmi.
A good place to start would be to open up the pages in a tool like visual studio and look at the list of violations listed. Go down the list and start fixing things that are deprecated or wrong. Notepad++ has an "HTML Tidy" feature that will reformat and correct some common mistakes. However, many of the problems that you are going to encounter are not trivial - as in the entire paradigm followed is probably wrong. Converting a site is, unfortunately not the type of thing that we can do by running the pages through a wizard. I would start by creating a new MasterPage (or global template for whatever framework) that uses CSS for formatting and layout. Then you can migrate blocks of text into the new "skeleton". Some of the CSS template sites offer really nice free templates. Hope this helps.
If this helps you, the new IE 9 has developer tools (F12) which allow you to use either the IE7, IE8 or IE9 rendering engines to view any page.
As a best practise, when making any content for the web you should be checking compatibility on at least the 3 main browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox), and probably some of the others (Safari). There are Visual Studio add-ins that can help with this kind of thing, by choosing which browser(s) are used for debug mode.
Some of the developer tool suites also allow you to edit content in the browser which can be a big time saver. This lets you tweak CSS and HTML and see the results in real-time, you then just have to apply your changes to the original code. Chrome, FireFox and IE (newer versions) all have tools for this kind of thing, and/or free plug-ins.
You will find in IE8 that the behaviour is better than IE7 and IE6 but still far from perfect, but should notice that the behaviour across Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc is fairly consistent.
i have some ASP.NET pages.
pages does not appear in FireFox4 same IE9.
i want to find my HTML or CSS Design problems.
i hared that this is a tool for finding problems.
but i can't use it because my ASP.NET Page contains some usercontrols.
I am looking for a way to find my design problems(tool , tip , etc).
another note is i am using jQuery UI plugins in my site.
One approach would be to use Chrome Developer Tools / Firebug / IE 8 Developer Tools to take a peek at the HTML being generated to look for any glaring errors. It can also help catch some jQuery issue that might be causing you grief.
Outside of that, HTML Tidy is a nice program that could help diagnose some stuff for you as well.
One thing to realize is that every browser renders a page slightly different, despite the attempts to render them in a "universal" manner. If you're really looking for the small differences, you can check out the SuperPreview tool that comes with Microsoft Expression Web
I'm doing css for a website. I send the html and css to a guy, he puts it into ASP.net. The problem is that the transfer didn't end well for my code and it needs some fixing. The problem is that when I look at it in Chrome, or Firefox, or IE8, I get three completely different renderings. I spent a good amount of time trying to fix a drop-down menu that is supposed to appear while hovering over a link. The one he had in place from ASP.net worked in IE, kinda worked in Firefox, and was completely broken in Chrome (I haven't tested Safari or Opera.) Just getting it to look basically the same in firefox and chrome was a struggle. The html source is showing me two completely different pages as well.
Does anyone have experience with this? I know nothing of ASP.net, and it seems like the guy is modifying my layout with a wsyiwyg (I found tables used in random places, which I did not put there.) Faced with this, what is my best option? Is this fixable, or am I in over my head?
Many times WYSIWYG programs don't generate code that results in reliable, consistent renderings. However, there are a few things you can do to check your site's consistency.
You can use a program like Adobe BrowserLab (there's a free trial right now) to automatically render your page in multiple browsers side by side
You can use the w3 Validator to make sure that your code is standards compliant. If your code isn't standards compliant, then you will likely have issues across browsers.
Note that you can force asp.net to generate XHTML Transitional- or Strict-compliant code (if that's the standard you choose to implement) via the web.config file. Use the directive
<xhtmlConformance mode="Transitional"/>
if you want to enable this behavior.
Was your code rendering fine in those browsers before you sent it off to the .NET guy? If so, the programmer is doing something to muck up your work. ASP .NET won't change the way your code renders... it's simply the Windows equivalent of PHP (simply put).
I would suggest (if you haven't already) testing your code before hand-off to verify proper rendering. Take some screenshots, and if after sending your code to this developer things break, you can point out that it was working until he started messing with your markup. If that ends up being the case, at least you know it wasn't you. If it was, then we have more work to do. :)
Can you provide any samples?
The html source is showing me two completely different pages as well.
That sounds like your asp.net guy is doing something wrong there. You can use asp.net to do browser-dependant rendering, but it sounds more like his job is to just make the site render what you gave him, and it's usually better to get your html and css right to begin with.
So I'm supposed to be a .Net Developer but have found myself getting stuck with allot of css and html stuff lately. I would now consider myself to be very strong in css and all it's intricacies. With that said I still see any use it any of the Visual Studio support for it outside of the intellisense (when it works).
I want to ask if anyone developers that view themselves strong in css are using any of the Visual Studio 2008 css support features and if so what they are and why they use them over say firebug?
Thanks,
Denis
Hand coded all the way for me.
Firebug is really good for getting to the bottom of wierd browser issues, but generally I have IE, Chrome and Firefox open when I'm coding html & CSS, and I just make sure I hit the refresh button often enough in all three of them to make sure I don't get any nasty suprises after writing a pile of css.
Typically I turn off all of the Visual Studio CSS stuff. It's not exactly well made. Instead I've been using MS Expression to build master pages and manage CSS files. It is light years ahead of VS.
That said, I see firebug as a complimentary product, not really a replacement. I use FireBug and the equivalents in safari, chrome, and IE 8 to see what's going on with the internals of a particular element on a page. I use Expression to edit and maintain the css.
I have a small website developed using VS2005 and mySQl, it's just 2 webforms and login page.
During the development and testing phase, me and my customer were using IE6, and it was looking fine, we didn't test with other browsers because it's a small application, and just a add-in for large desktop application.
The customer informed me that site doesn't like the same when he installed IE7, for example I have a webfrom that show a page with Gridview that has multiply pages(AllowPaging=On), it doesn't look fine in IE7 and I can't navigate to other pages in Gridview, but it was working fine with IE6, and there's no complicated things, just plan GridView with small formatting.
I installed IE8 and doesn't look fine with it too, even in compatibility mood.
Have anyone faced the same problem?, and what should be the quickest or best solution for that?.
I know, I SHOULD NEVER USE WEBFORMS AGAIN.
The only reason for a difference in look between the browser versions is your styling and doctype.
Start with setting a doctype to run in quirks mode. You can get information about it here.
After that, see if things improve. If not, I would start ripping out any css/styles/themes you may be using. Then build it back up using normal CSS.
Incidentally, web forms isn't the problem in this case; it's a styling issue.
as Chris mentioned, add to that that browsers have really some annoying differences that makes you pull your hair sometimes, and 90 % of the time it is related to CSS.
so what i suggest is the following
use a tool called IE Tester, it is amazing tool that let you test your sites in all IE versions.
Use conditional command for targeting IE specific version if some CSS rule is wrong.
we use this tool http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/ it is really amazing it let you define css rules for each browser without hacking or conditional statement, but the down side it is Javascript dependent, but we had no complains.
also this script http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ which is brilliant, it will let IE 6 behave like IE 7 which will save you tons of problems, again it is Java Script dependent.
Avoid Hacks as much as possible, the above methods will help you a lot.
hope this helps.