(Ovid) RE: Lesson Two of Online CGI Course

I'll address the easy one first :)

Seems odd that the exercise concentrates on the code you're trying to get people NOT to use...

I had given that some thought and what finally settled it for me is that I didn't want a bunch of people saying "yeah, but I wrote my own CGI parsing routine and it works fine." Now, I can just point them to Lesson Two and not worry about it. In short, how can I tell someone not to do something unless I tell them why?

Ugh. I just looked at it in Netscape. Bad, bad, bad. I've used absolute position instead of relative positioning and obviously I need to rethink this. Plus, Netscape doesn't allow for the nifty boxes with colored backgrounds that I get with IE. I'm wondering if I'll have to go with simple tables to get those back.

I can't take advantage of the tilly's Apache solution as it is not my server. Actually, that "it's not my server" situation is frustrating. I'd prefer to let people be able to run those programs from the site, but my ISP doesn't allow CGI scripts. Yuck.

I think I have a rough handle on most of the problems and I'll work them out as soon as I can.

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: If anyone notices any factual errors, please let me know!!!

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Comment on (Ovid) RE: Lesson Two of Online CGI Course

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CSS Resources by TGI (Parson) on Oct 13, 2000 at 06:37 UTC
You should really check out this stylesheet demo site. It renders boxes properly with Netscape 4.5 in WinNT. I also recommend trying different browsers against the W3C CCS Test Suite if you want to know what they can do, it's a great reality check when something you coded doesn't show up right. Western Civ has some interesting if semi-ugly pages with a great browser compatibility matrix. They also have other good stuff nearby. Since imperfect HTML can get really hosed by stylesheets, validate your html. If you use CGI.pm, watch out--it generates a HTML 2.0 doctype descriptor that this validator hates (is this a bug?). You may also want to validate your stylesheet. I hope you find this info useful, even though it ain't strictly Perl. Update: The newest versions of CGI.pm can generate a variety of doctype declarations.	[reply]
RE: (Ovid) RE: Lesson Two of Online CGI Course by footpad (Abbot) on Oct 19, 2000 at 18:13 UTC
Ovid, The material is great; I'll be looking for more. Very educational. However, those monks that access the 'Net from behind a firewall that filters out "inappropriate content" may not be able to get to Lesson 2. For example, the company I work for uses something from WebSense, which catgorizes the site containing Lesson 2 as a "Hacking" site and prevents access. (Would really like to rant about it, but what's the use?) The solution is easy: read it from home. Also, you may wish to consider doing some print tests during your Browser compatibility verifications. I've seen problems with both NS and IE when printing CSS-based pages that can be correctly viewed. Hope this helps... -- footpad	[reply]


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