a brave thing to do, or a stupid thing to do?

[gabrielcrowe]

before i go ahead and grep my life away, in a desperate bid for standards compliance, what would happen if:

i stripped every template of '<ACTINIC:GUBBINS>' tagging?

is it possible for me to still adit back in the damaged content?
what do they all do? these tags?
what's the worst case scenario?
what can expect to stop working?

[pinbrook]

Actinic will not work if you take out all the '<ACTINIC:GUBBINS>' tagging

[dave_finlayson]

is it possible for me to still adit back in the damaged content?
what do they all do? these tags?
what's the worst case scenario?
what can expect to stop working?

Q1: Yes you can add them back in but will you remember where they all were and what the Netquotevars were?
Q2. They make Actinic work
Q3. Your shop won't work and you may consider suicide, although probably only briefly
Q4. More than likely everything will stop working if you strip them all out!

Hope this helps

David

[jont]

a desperate bid for standards compliance

The Actinic functionality will never pass standards compliance - there are lots of threads about reducing the errors (including a worthy one started by magicalwonders) to the minimum.

If you have already stripped them out you will need to replace them with the original templates - trying to add them back in again manually is fruitless. I always tend to take a copy of any templates before undertaking any major mods so if it goes pear-shaped (quite easily with delicate Actinic codes) simply a case of renaming back to the original and overwriting

[gabrielcrowe]

i havent destroyed the aforementioned gubbins, but more to my point,

what do they all _do_

[jont]

Think there is a long listing in the back of the Advanced User Guide as to what they do - most are self explanatory (probably the older names) but some are a little obscure and must have been named after a big night out by the program team

[NormanRouxel]

Removing some <Actinic:...> tags may seem to work OK and that the code seems useless to a browser

However some are used as placemarkers for the Perl scripts to inspect and operate on. You may find problems in the Search, Cart, Checkout, Shipping and Customer Log-In without these.

E.g. the BASEHREF one is passed unaltered on most pages (and simply ignored by browsers) but on some Perl based pages it is used to insert a valid HTML <BASE HREF="...."> tag.

[gabrielcrowe]

...and so if perl scripts are looking for these items, cant i simply edit the perl to look for something more compliant?

i know this all seems contrived. apologies for my awkwardness.

[NormanRouxel]

All the Perl source is there. This may work, if you've a few weeks to spare and don't mind having a site that can't be upgraded with re-doing all the work.

These Actinic tags are technically compilant and aren't worth losing any sleep over in my opinion.

Part of the HTML spec' and browser design is that browsers simply ignore unknown tags or sub-tags.

Consider the operation of the <framset ...> and <noframes>no frames alternative content</noframes> tags. Old browsers don't know what <frameset..> means and and ignore it. They also ignore the <noframes> and </noframes>, letting the no frames alternative content code show. Modern browsers understand <noframes>...</noframes> and hide the unneeded text. A neat solution to allowing backwards compatibility.