[Zope] Stripping HTML tags or not [WAS: (something like) making static pages dynamic] dynamic]

Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:28:01 +0200

At 13:37 13-10-99 , Albert Kinderman wrote:
>A recent discussion on the list concerned how to strip the usual tags
>from the beginning and end of a static html document produced by a
>wysiwyg editor and replace the tags with the standard_html_header and
>standard_html_footer.   On my site, my standard_html_headers and
>standard_html_footers are customized to the type of document, so that I
>have created a ZClass for each type.  Each ZClass is a folder and has an
>index_html
>
><dtml-var standard_html_header>
><dtml-var content>
><dtml-var standard_html_footer>
>
>so that the content managers only have to upload the content and not
>worry about the headers and footers.  Within this context, if a manager
>uses Netscape Publisher and publishes, for example, to
>http://mysite/Zope/../(ZClassInstance)/content,
>content will contain the set of tags produced by Publisher.
>
>At this point, the source of a rendering of the document will contain
>two sets of <head>, <body>, etc. tags.  However, in Netscape Navigator,
>the extra tags seem to be ignored and the page appears the same as if
>the extra tags have been stripped out.
>
>This raises several questions:
>
>1) Does the HTML standard say that browsers should ignore the extra
>tags?

No, the behaviour is undefined. Some browsers will use the first body tag, 
others will use the last, and some will just break.

>2) If not, do all or most other browsers ignore the extra tags anyway?

Depends on the browser, and differs from platform to platform and from 
version to version.

>If the answer to either question is yes, then as a practical matter it
>is not necessary to strip out the extra tags as long as the
>standard_html_header and standard_html_footer enclose them.
>
>I should note that in my case the standard_html_header sets up a table
>with a side bar in the first column so that content is inside a table
>element.  I don't know if the extra tags would be ignored under other
>conditions.

Generally not a good idea.

--
Martijn Pieters, Web Developer
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