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web page tags not substituting

Posted: Sat 29 Aug 2009 9:12 am
by DanielF
I've set up a website with my Cumulus data (http://www.users.on.net/~idmills/), and as part of this edited indexT.htm (using FrontPage2000) to add some text (caveats). After editing and saving, two of the tags now don't get substituted:
Welcome to <#longlocation>

The weather station in use is the WH1081PC, and these pages are updated every 5 minutes. The meteorological day used at this station ends at <#rollovertime>.
I've tried retyping those tags (in case some non-printing char became embedded in them), but no change. What could cause this misbehaviour?

Re: web page tags not substituting

Posted: Sat 29 Aug 2009 9:24 am
by beteljuice
Don't use Frontpage :shock:
It has done a bit of 'translating' and changed the < and >.
Here's part of a view source:

Code: Select all

<p>Welcome to <#longlocation>&nbsp; </p>
<p>The weather station in use is the WH1081PC, and these pages are updated 
every 5 minutes. The meteorological day used at this station ends at
<#rollovertime>.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
Use Notepad ;)

Re: web page tags not substituting

Posted: Sat 29 Aug 2009 1:24 pm
by DanielF
beteljuice wrote:Don't use Frontpage :shock:
...
Use Notepad ;)
Beteljuice, thanks as always for your help.

I remember reading a warning in the Cumulus Help pages about editors changing brackets, but in my naivety never suspected that an editor intended for web page editing would do that!

Unfortunately I haven't yet learned HTML, so am a little hesitant to use Notepad for editing HTML code. Can you recommend a user-friendly HTML editor for novices like me that doesn't change angle brackets?

As this particular change was fairly straighforward, I did edit the HTML directly (with Crimson, my editor of choice), and it's now displaying correctly on the web page. Thanks again.

Re: web page tags not substituting

Posted: Sat 29 Aug 2009 4:23 pm
by steve
DanielF wrote:but in my naivety never suspected that an editor intended for web page editing would do that!
That's precisely the sort of editor that would change the angle brackets. If you want to display angle brackets on a web page, they should be encoded as < and > but the use Cumulus is putting them to is for control information, and never appears on the web page. The typical web page editor doesn't recognise the <#webtag> construction as an html construct, so helpfully assumes you're going to be displaying the web tag on the finished page and encodes them.

I suspect that most web page editors when used in WYSIWYG mode will do the encoding. I use Expression Blend, but make sure that any web tag editing I do is done in plain text mode.

Re: web page tags not substituting

Posted: Sat 29 Aug 2009 10:30 pm
by Super-T
Simple and free...try Komposer
http://kompozer.net/