Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Dreamweaver MX2004 and Frames...

T

TENBLUE7™

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 4, 2003
98
0
Sheffield - England
I've been using MX2004 at an agency I freelance at and have noticed some kind of glitch, perhaps.

A frame set as no resize and auto or default scroll will preview fine with one vertical scroll bar on a mac in all major browsers, but when viewed on a PC on all OS versions there is also a horizontal scroll bar for no reason as all the content is obviously within a table well within the width of the correct size.

Resorted back to MX (version 6.1) and everything is fine no horizontal scroll bar!
There is nothing worse than a useless scrollbar on a site using frames it looks disgusting.

I've checked the code and everything seems to be the same in both versions, althougth I am a WYSIWYG builder and have average hand coding skills.

Just wondered if anyone had come across the same problem, I know that sites should be built on dare I say it a PC but I'm not changing after 8 years on macs.

Cheers Christian.
 
is this happening just in the preview, or does it persist if you save the file and open it from within your browser(s)?
 
Preview (F12) on mac is fine it's a case of finish it on a mac upload to relevant server then walk across the studio to check it live on the PC and find another scroll bar.

I never design anything that will use a horizontal scroll bar - user testing and feedback and all that all says no.

If I edit the frame properties on a pc to make it work i.e scrollbars set at auto or yes and re upload, the result is no scrollbars on my mac???

Fireworks 2004 html docs are not recognised by Dreamweaver MX 6.1 which is a nightmare as I'll have to revert back to version 6 of that as well.

Had loads of probs with DW MX2004 it'd boot up and decide not to show any menus, the keyboard shortcuts don't work and in Flash MX2004 as well and I use that every other day.

:(
 
...The sites that where displaying the problem have been fixed and I've uninstalled MX2004 this afternoon.

I'll re-install and create a sample frame-set as soon as possible.

Cheers.
 
OK two simple frame sets, one done in MX 6.1 and the other in MX2004.

Checked both in IE, Netscape, Safari and Opera (all latest versions) on this Mac running 10.3.2, all fine.

Check both on my PC running ME, and the MX2004 site has a horizontal scroller, the other has not.

MX 6.1

MX2004

Cheers
 
OK, right off the bat, you've got different widths for one of the frames in the two designs.

Line 10:
<frameset rows="*" cols="*,750,*"> (MX 6.1)
<frameset rows="*" cols="*,700,*"> (MX 2004)
 
Cheers for taking the time to have a look, my bad on that though I doubt it makes any difference as there's no horizontal scroller on a mac but there is on a PC.

Anyway I've amended both sets to be 700 wide and embedded the copy into a table 650 wide. As we know no scroll bar is that wide but there's still a horizontal scroll bar on a PC not on a Mac.

MX 6.1

MX2004
 
I had the same problem some time ago, and eventually redesigned the whole (fortunately small) site with tables to avoid this issue. There seems to be something wrong with the implementation of CSS support in IE. When CSS is used in frames it causes this kind of behavior. MX2004 uses them, and MX does not.

This is pure speculation, but IE seems not to include the vertical scrollbar into the width of the frame and when it's added, the frame doesn't fit anymore... I'll have to check this tomorrow at work as my home is Windows-free zone ;)
 
Or design it to be all CSS and no tables. ;)

I'll have to do some checking at work, too, since I'm similarly Windows-free at home and my cursory examination isn't showing me anything other than the difference that happo pointed out. MX 6.1 uses font tags while MX 2004 is using CSS.

I don't really see how the CSS could be doing that, since I'm not seeing any sort of width/size declarations in your CSS, but stranger things have happened with IE/Win.
 
Solution!

The DOCTYPE declaration seems to be the one causing the problem. By changing the declaration (first two rows of "MX2004" content file):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

to:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

removes the horizontal scrollbar! :) If I'm not totally wrong this violates some rules, but seems to work.

I was just guessing before and CSS seems to have nothing to do with this issue, but still I have met some strange things with IE when using CSS with frames (and XHTML).
 
OK, I got confused with XHTML and HTML. Both DOCTYPEs above are valid for HTML 4.01, and only XHTML needs the dtd URI to be displayed...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back