Remove all Actinic:Template tags?

[Kev@Flexi.Net]

Hi,

I'm in the middle of designing a new actinic site and I have most of the core design stuff done apart from some minor items during the checkout etc. However I am having a big problem with the brochure homepage.

The problem is that Actinic is putting the <Actinic:TEMPLATE> tag before the doctype declaration and it's throwing IE back into quicks mode and destroying the site layout. (See http://www.floatylady.co.uk/index.html in Internet Explorer to see what I mean).

Every other page works fine as Actinic doesn't put the template declaration above the doctype. Is there any way I can turn off these Actinic:template tags? I have no need for them whatsoever.

(PS. I've seen in other posts a response such as turn on Compact HTML mode but this really breaks the site and there is no way i'm going to let the site go out with all the source in one line! )

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Kev

[jont]

Design | Options | Misc | Compact Cgi and HTML - tick the box

[wjcampbe]

PS. I've seen in other posts a response such as turn on Compact HTML mode but this really breaks the site and there is no way i'm going to let the site go out with all the source in one line!

I would really worry about this. If there is something in your page that is disguised as a comment (and thus is not included in the compact html), but is essential to operation, then you really should look again at the implementation.

[jont]

there is no way i'm going to let the site go out with all the source in one line!

Why? It will not affect anyone other than someone looking at the source code .. it will not affect your customer or users at all

[NormanRouxel]

I'm bemused as to why Kevin prefers to have his pages about 4 times bigger that they need be by leaving all the diagnostic comments in.

If I was a client who discovered that my site was being slugged to suit a designers whims, I'd be rightly mad.

If there's some technical reason for having some <!-- ... --> type comments then just put them in a Customvar.

[Kev@Flexi.Net]

I would really worry about this. If there is something in your page that is disguised as a comment (and thus is not included in the compact html), but is essential to operation, then you really should look again at the implementation.

Unfortunately Internet Explorer has a number of bugs that require conditional comments to work-around. If you had ever done any design using modern web standards then you would know what I mean. I also have to include our php code inside comments so that it doesn't show up when actinic switches over to it's cgi scripts.

I'm bemused as to why Kevin prefers to have his pages about 4 times bigger that they need be by leaving all the diagnostic comments in.

It makes virtually no difference to the page size. All our pages are automatically gzipped on the fly. Also, considering that pretty much all of the design of the site is in a css file that is cached locally on the clients machine the individual page download sizes really aren't that large at all. I hardly see an average page size of 2.5KB as something to worry about.

If I was a client who discovered that my site was being slugged to suit a designers whims, I'd be rightly mad.

As stated before there are certain needs for the code to be layed out the way it is, it's made this way so that the client can have the design they want. If it costs the client more money because it takes us longer to debug their site then it's also in the interest of the client to have properly formatted code is it not?

Anyhow, I take it from your responses that there is no way to turn of the actinic:template tags without affecting all of the other code. I suppose we'll just have to switch to a static homepage and get actinic to upload it's index.html file somewhere else.

Cheers,
Kev

[wjcampbe]

There is a fix posted on here by Norman, that allows you to use the php comments and still compact the html.

I don't presume to know it all, but I do know that a good proportion of Actinic site operating problems are caused by web designers who do not take the time to learn and work with Actinic.

Web design work can make the site pretty, Actinic can make it a successful e-commerce venture - offer the client that choice.

[Kev@Flexi.Net]

There is a fix posted on here by Norman, that allows you to use the php comments and still compact the html.

Unfortunately there were other problems the compact mode caused so I've had to resort to having a static index page and having IIS redirect to it from the index.html page. Would have been a lot simpler with mod_rewrite on apache but you've gotta live with what you're given at times.

I don't presume to know it all, but I do know that a good proportion of Actinic site operating problems are caused by web designers who do not take the time to learn and work with Actinic.

I agree with you there, we've been building actinic sites since version 3 and have learned to work with actinic to do what we want. However actinic is increasingly falling further and further behind in each version in regards to what clients want and what the competition provides. This has caused us to invent a lot of workarounds to get functionality or design features into a site that Actinic simply doesn't provide.