Firefox Not Displaying Site Woes.
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For some reason or another, I cannot get Firefox to display my header and index files correctly. I validated my CSS mark-up on W3C and there were no errors found and have made sure my MIME settings are correct as well. Everything works perfectly fine in IE, but Firefox the only thing that displays is my background.
All help is appreciated.
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a) Your page doesn’t validate: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fu-chain.org%2F&charset=windows-1252&doctype=Inline&ss=1
b) You have a different character encoding in the meta tag vs. what the blog is actually set to, meaning I had to manually override to make validation get that far.
c) Your page takes *forever* to load. Probably because of that annoying music player.
d) The page appears to cut off early, which is why most of it is missing..
In short, the page is massively invalid and I’m amazed it works in any browser. Might want to validate it and correct all the errors.
Been there & done that. I cannot get the character encoding to work no matter what I try. However, what i did do was test each php file separately. The header.php file (the direct link to that is as follows: http://u-chain.org/news/wp-content/themes/orange.header.php has 11 errors total, all of which are more or less telling me to include the ALT tag in the image. ) Errors that would not mess up the display. And I’m not sure what your speed is, but on my cable modem the player (in IE & Avant & Safari anyway ) loads before the page itself loads.
And it cuts off early because it’s using php includes? From my understanding, if you use includes, each file does not use a DOC TYPE, meta file, html, head, etc. etc. tag because when loaded together that make up one page.
And I did not get ANY of the page to load in Firefox — except for the sidebar, which is where the player is located so if that were the issue wouldn’t the sidebar take forever to load versus the header file?
Okay, you cannot directly connect to the theme like that. That’s not how this works. You validate the whole page or none of it. It’s not a split it up into pieces deal here.
The first thing is to fix the character encoding problem. What do you have as the encoding on the Options->Reading page? You might want to stick to UTF-8 for that, and then remove the meta tag from your page. This will mean that you’ll have to find the invalid characters and remove them, but that’s generally easier than futzing with the encoding.
Once you’ve fixed the encoding, then it’s just a matter of validating. And yes, IMG’s require ALTs and so forth, depending on your doctype. Skipping the “little stuff” means you’ll sometimes miss the big stuff. Part of being a web designer means making valid code.
Errors that would not mess up the display.
Why do people *always* say this? I just don’t understand.
YES it will mess up your display. Not always, but many times, and the *reason* you validate your code is so that your site does *not* display in quirks mode. If any part of your code is invalid, the browser switches to quirks mode, and it will overcompensate a lot of things – many times it *will* mess up your site display.
Yes – even missing alt tags will do it.
Do what Otto said, and I utterly agree – validate that code. It *does* matter.
People say this because it is true for the most part. There are plenty of other sites with more errors than I have that display relatively the same in all browsers. I’m not trying to take the “easy” way out; based on THAT, it just seems that validating the little things will not make a significant change when <i>my</i> problem is not with the site displaying oddly, rather the content does not display at all.
What difference would it make if you attempted to validate the site piece by piece? It would actually make more sense to do so if you are doing includes because you can better see WHERE and in what file the main error is occurring. That way you can isolate the problem better. Since when you validate the whole page it renders ALL of the includes, all it is doing is condensing all of the errors into one file anyway.
On an added note, I’m not sure the problem is with my theme itself — as other themes that I did not make (i.e. the default and classic themes) do not display in Firefox either.
Also noted, I noticed I could get my graphics to display by altering my external stylesheet link in the header.php file. Currently, it looks like: “/news/wp-content/theme/orange/style.css” but when I took out the first slash (ie. “news/…” ) all of my images showed but of course it did not render the CSS. I then validated the CSS which shows no error so any ideas on why that may be?
Thank you for your time.
uchain: The point we’re trying to make here is that it is extremely difficult to debug broken pages when the site is invalid to start with. So the general attitude you’ll find is “make the site valid, then we’ll talk”. If it was one or two errors, then it’d be no big deal, but you’ve got hundreds and looking at the source gives obviously invalid HTML, and so forth. It’s like wading through a swamp to find anything at all.
The simple fact is that, in the process of making you site valid, you’ll likely find and correct the problem. Valid sites have this amazing tendency to *just work*.
So rather than spend all my free time trying to sort out one problem out of the clearly dozens you have on there, it’s a lot easier for me to simply tell you to make your site valid and you’ll probably fix it in the process. The process is more important than the end result.
And that is just the simple truth of the matter.
On the other hand, if you really want somebody’s help, then I suggest you leave contact information so anybody interested can email or call you and quote you their rates, because what you’re asking for is beyond the “free help” arena and into the realm of “paid professional help”.
People say this because it is true for the most part.
No, it’s not. The point of validating is to ensure your code is semantic and being written properly for the doctype you are using. If you are not doing it correctly, your site will not validate. Invalid code results in your browser throwing your site into “quirks” mode, which means your broser will try to *guess* what it is you’re trying to do with your site. Sometimes it’s right. Most times it’s wrong, and causes our site to look weird. Again, *anything* not valid will case this to happen.
There are plenty of other sites with more errors than I have that display relatively the same in all browsers.
They’re either damn lucky, or their site’s code/CSS is hacked to hell and back – which is a band-aid solution. Go back to the cliche: if everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge…
it just seems that validating the little things will not make a significant change when <i>my</i> problem is not with the site displaying oddly, rather the content does not display at all.
How do you know? That’s another thing that gets me. Validating is so freaking *easy* it’s unreal how many people try to avoid it. You start with the first thing in the list, and many times, the next 50 things correct *theselves*. I don’tthink you’re taking the easy way out in not validation – I think you’re making things way too hard on yourself.
What difference would it make if you attempted to validate the site piece by piece?
HUGE difference. PHP includes bring in certain pieces one after another. You could validate each section, but much of the stuff that’scoming in won’t even be looed at if you do it piece by piece, because all of the info isn’t being run through the validator. For example, your links list – it’s a PHP include. If you just validate the sidebar, all you’re validating are th DIV tags – nothing else, because the validator won’t see it. You have to do the page *as a whole* to be sure everything is validating correctly, because that’s the only way the validator will see *everything*.
That way you can isolate the problem better. Since when you validate the whole page it renders ALL of the includes, all it is doing is condensing all of the errors into one file anyway.
No, it’s not. If you only do ine at a time, it’ll never render the parts correctly, because the validator does HTML – NOT PHP. PHP is invisiable – only the output is visible to the validator. If you do i piece by piece, you are NOT getting the whole picture at all.
/news/wp-content/theme/orange/style.css
That should be “themes” – with an “s”. You should also use the PHP code to link to your stylesheet – not hard code it in. (And full paths to your images in your stylesheet as well.)
I’m looking at the site now, and you have two doctypes in your header – I’m sure that shows up in the validator.
You also hav *several* javascripts in your page. If I were you, I’d be sure one isn’t conflicting with another. Take ’em all out and see if stuff shows up. If they do, put ’em back in one by one.
When is the last time that you attempted to validate it? As even before I saw your first initial reply, I had already rectified nearly all of the errors and there aren’t 200 some, more like 40. The point that I’m trying to make is that no matter the number of errors at this point, specific to my coding personally, there is NOTHING showing and I have not seen anything different from the first time when it DID have all those errors.
I hope I do not sound unappreciative because I am thankful for the advice. And I do respect the general attitude here, however condescending it may sound via the computer, but it seems as if people keep echoing the same thing without factoring in specific problems I mentioned.
Thank you doodlebee, I really appreciate you taking the time out to address each thing I’ve said.
I was not saying I wasn’t going to validate my site, though. I think you misconstrued that portion.
And I’m aware of what PHP includes are — that’s the point I was making. Validate each php file first, make sure that those are cleaned up and then validate the whole thing. Perhaps I’m thinking too logically, but that makes perfect sense to me. If your header file is messed up on its own, then it’s still messed up coupled with the whole site correct?
And I tried that php include link to my stylesheet before — that doesn’t seem to work for whatever reason. I could not render the CSS at all with the include. & I know the themes is an s, that right there was just a typo.
And hmm, thank you for the suggestion with the javascripts. Trying that right now.
Thanks again for all the suggestions.
The thing about validation is not that it is some huge, possibly insurmountable hurdle. It is an AID to web programming if you do it as you go along. Firefox has a local validator available or three as a plugin.
I did not say validation was some huge hurdle. It’s great on fixing codes and finding problems — however, what people seem to be missing is that validated or not, my site is still not displaying at all. As of right now, I have 12 errors — 99% having to do with alt tags and still no signs of any of the images I have loading besides the background. Very frustrated.
I am on Firefox and it looks fine. Did you fix it?
however, what people seem to be missing is that validated or not, my site is still not displaying at all. As of right now, I have 12 errors —
I think what *you* are missing is that your site isn’t validated. That could be why nothing is showing.
I understand what you are saying (and you did not mention before that you were validating piece by piece and then validating on the whole – that’s fine if that’s how you want to do it – as long as you still validate on the whole) – but the point *we* were trying to make is, get it 100% validated, and *then* see if it’s still not showing. That was the point of our message. Again, if there’s even *one* error in your validation, it could cause problems. You should *always* validate 100% first to rule out any fixable issues that could cause this very problem. (As Root said, it’s an invaluable tool that can greatly aid in these issues.) So you can’t really say “validated or not, it’s not showing” when you didn’t validate it in the first place to see if that was the problem.
For future reference, we aren’t being condescending or trying to throw an attitude, we’re trying to help. It just gets a little wiggy when we offer real and helpful advice, and the person we offer it to shoots it down because they think it’s not important. It’s kind of condescending to *us*.
Anyway, apparently you got it fixed – and that’s great. You should mark the thread resolved (and say how you fixed it, for others coming through, if you could). 🙂
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