DR. WEBSITE
HTML Housekeeping Can Clean Up Coding Errors
Dear Dr. Website®: What could cause the occasional stray text characters and other weird symbols that show up on my Web pages when there's nothing in the source code to indicate anything's there?
You may be inadvertently entering hidden control characters into your Web documents as you type in your word processor or HTML editor. Some HTML editors offer a menu command for stripping out these troublesome characters, or "gremlins," as they're sometimes called. If you're a Mac user, you can strip them out with Bare Bones Software's BBEdit or World Wide Web Weaver, among others. On the Windows side, the Textpad text editor from Helios Software Solutions will help you strip out hidden control characters.
Dear Dr. Website®: We would like to implement an e-mail newsletter that will be sent to those Web site visitors who subscribe via an e-mail form on our Web site. We would like software to automatically compile the e-mail addresses as submitted by subscribers and have the newsletter sent out as a broadcast e-mail when published. What software is available for managing the database of e-mail addresses behind the scenes?
Setting up your own mailing list can help you accomplish the automated group e-mail tasks you describe. A mailing list is controlled by software known as a list server, which you should ask your site's administrator or your Internet provider to help you set up.
A single list server can control many mailing lists, each of which will have its own e-mail address. When you're ready to mail your newsletter, you address and send it to the entire distribution list. Users can also send e-mail to the mailing list address to take care of subscribing and unsubscribing themselves, so there's less maintenance of the subscribers' database on the host end than you might imagine.
It's possible for you either to have a one-way mailing list, in which you as the list maintainer simply deliver information on a regular basis to your list subscribers, or to use a mailing list as a basis for ongoing threaded discussions delivered via e-mail instead of posted to an online bulletin board.
There is also a Mailing List FAQ available that is posted to various Internet-services newsgroups on a regular basis. To have a copy e-mailed to you directly, send a message to majordomo@edmonds.home.cs.ubc.ca with the line "get faq ml-providers.txt" in the body of the message.
Dear Dr. Website®: Is there any way to get rid of extra space at the top of a frame?
There are a couple of attributes available for the <FRAME> tag that might help you do that. MARGINHEIGHT is an optional attribute that can control the upper and lower margins of a frame. Similarly, MARGINWIDTH takes care of left and right margins within a frame. Your <FRAME> tag would then read something like this: <FRAME NAME="url" SRC= "/old?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwebdeveloper.com%2Fdrweb%2Fsomefile.html&y=1999" MARGINWIDTH=0 MARGINHEIGHT=0> The value you enter for both margin-related attributes is measured in pixels.
Dear Dr. Website®: In which cases do you recommend using imagemaps rather than real links? Wouldn't it be better to design straightforward navigation tools (say, a simple bar) using links rather than maps?
As a graphical index to your site, an imagemap can offer the benefits of nonverbal communication. Even if your imagemap contains some labeled text, the graphical portion can help to convey information more quickly. This is similar to the way that the icons used by airport signs and some traffic signals are designed to communicate to a broad, international audience. From a strict design standpoint, the two main caveats to bear in mind are the importance of providing a text-based alternative to allow access for all users, and to make sure that the amount of time it takes your imagemap to display isn't so excessive it drives away readers.
Send your site development questions to Dr. Website at drweb@internet.com, or visit the Ask Dr. Website page.
Reprinted from Web Week, Volume 2, Issue 9, July 8, 1996 © internet.com Corporation All rights reserved. Keywords: site-management, html Date: 19960708
