Actinic not honouring HTML?

[jxm28788]

I am starting to redesign the ACT_Primary.html file, and am starting with fairly simply stuff until I get the hang of it. The first thing I have done is to remove the NETQUOTEVAR:LOGOIMAGE and replace it with the search field (which was somewhere else).

The html looks like this -

<table width="100%" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" background="palette2bg.gif">
<tr>
<td align="right"> NETQUOTEVAR:SIMPLESEARCH</td>
<td align="right">NETQUOTEVAR:FOOTERGUIDE&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>

(I turned the border on for debugging purposes)

Now when I look at this in my html editor 'preview' the table consists of one row, split down the centre with the search box right aligned to the centre of the screen (as would be expected (by me)).

But when I save the file and preview the page in actinic it comes out differently -

The columns are no longer equal widths, the left column is much smaller, and the text is centered not right aligned. I can force the column bigger by using the 'width' attribute, but still the alignment doesn't work.

What's going on here? Why is actnic behaving differently (and incorrectly?). I realise that my html editors preview isn't going to be accurate because it doesn't understand the variables and just prints them on the screen as text - but I don't see why actinic apparently ignores the html table attributes, unless the variable itself has attributes to it???

[NormanRouxel]

Just do a View Source of the generated page, search for "palette2bg.gif" and you'll see what tags have been inserted by Actinic.

Norman

[jxm28788]

ah, I see what it's doing... It's calling act_simplesearch.html which formats the search box...

that's fixed the alignment, but the colum width still isn't right - they should be equal widths.

[jxm28788]

ok that's sorted as well, just added 'width=50%' to one of the rows.

not sure why actinic interprets that differently to my html editor though - what's is it supposed to do if no row width is specified?

[NormanRouxel]

Actinic won't "interpret" your tags. It will just pass them unaltered into the generated HTML which your web-browser has to render.

Sure you'll get a 100% wide table but the cells will be sized to suit their content (as interpreted by IE / Netscape / Opera - all possibly in slightly different ways). That's why, as you discovered, that you need to explicitly set the width of each.

As you've probably discovered now some NETQUOTEVARS call other template (which may have other NETQUOTEVARS within) and some NETQUOTEVARS call the text in Design / Text / HTML and a few seem to be directly expanded by the Actinic program and are impossible to customise.

Just to add to the fun many NETQUOTEVARs are only valid within a small (often single) template.

Norman