It is becoming obvious that trying to educate David into better ways is
futile.
It is sad that there is almost nobody posting here highlighting his
commonplace errors and offering genuinely helpful advice which will really
help people avoid the issues which are causing them to post here in the
first place in future.
I got interested in reading the stuff here when the problems with IE8
emerged. I was quite shocked to see the amount of misunderstanding, errors
and falsehoods being propagated here, so felt I had to contribute.
Ultimately the reader must decide for themselves, but I will undoubtedly
tire of the role of a perforated messenger.
I would urge people to look elsewhere to gain a balanced view. David has
highlighted David Bartosik as being a respected commentator on Publisher -
look here:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/dbartosik/a...-the-typical-publisher-web-design-newbie.aspx
I'll quote an extract from that page:
"How do I get my Publisher web pages to display correctly in all browsers?
Basically you don't. Publisher is designed to exploit the technologies of
the Internet Explorer browser. Support in a non Windows IE browser is
limited at best. It is a limitation of using Publisher for a web site."
David advocates making changes to your web page designs to work around the
problems which Publisher creates - ask yourself, why should you do that? A
tool is supposed to help you do things, not make it more difficult. Surely,
if it isn't good enough to do what you want, and the tool either isn't
necessary or there are better ones available - using a better tool would be
a sensible approach Publisher, after all, was never designed for or intended
to be seriously used for making web pages.
I may yet post a comment to one of Davids other recent rants but as it's
quite lengthy and nearly every sentence in it is wrong or misleading, I
simply don't have the time at the moment. Presumably unlike David I'm being
paid for the application of my expertise elsewhere.
David says he is wasting his time with my nonsense - I would say the
uninformed reader is setting themselves up for wasting a considerably larger
amount of their time, if not now in the future, having unquestioningly
followed the 'advice' often parroted here. As I write, many people are
having to make adjustments to their Publisher built web sites to make them
work with IE8. The pressure to sort this out will soon increase - Microsoft
have just announced that IE8 is to be rolled out as a forced update next
week. Coincidentally, they have also said a patch for Publisher will also be
out next week, but you can almost be certain you will have to do all this
again when IE9 comes out, and there will be no patches to fix the problems
with older versions of Publisher.
Standards? As David says, who needs them? Well - the truth is that
standards-based web pages will suffer none of these problems, and you could
update and fix them if necessary with virtually any standards based tool
(Notepad!). That's what they are for. If there is a problem with display in
any particular browser - then you can rest assured that the fault is with
the browser and not your web page.
you *can*
produce cross browser compatible webs with Publisher 2000, 2002, 2003 and
2007, *IF* you know how to use the program properly.
Repeating himself:
You *can* build Publisher webs that are cross browser compatible. This is
not an opinion...
Yes it is, and it's wrong. Try asking Google - you may find this:
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/crossbrowser.html and this:
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/mspublisher.html among umpteen
others.
The real position here is that the best you can hope to achieve is pages
that are readable in various browsers (which is not quite the same thing as
cross-browser compatible) if you *don't use* certain features of the
program which are known to cause problems. I wouldn't call that "using the
program properly" - you'll find nothing in the documentation on what
"properly" in this context means.
In the end he can
offer no facts or rational, logical reasons for not using Publisher to
build webs,
Well, the facts that building web pages with Publisher causes people lots of
problems (which David is of course here to help with!) and generates
inefficient non-standard proprietary html which is at least ten times more
voluminous than it needs to be and often doesn't work in anything but
Microsoft's browser, and even sometimes in that - simply aren't good enough
for David, so what can I say.
Although I could also add that it's extremely limiting in what it allows you
to do do in your page designs as well, but it hardly seems worth it as it
still won't help. Rollovers, anyone? All those dangerous bits which you have
to put in embedded html fragments? Centreing pages properly? Being able to
determine the filenames of pages to match incoming links?
Finally, you cannot achieve valid compliant code, your pages will fail
accessibility tests and requirements, and here in the UK at least will
probably fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act as a result and you
may lay yourself open to prosecution and heavy fines.
It's a long list and I could go on...
With these things said, my goal in this group is to continue to provide
people who post in this group all the information they need to make
educated
decisions about using Publisher to build their webs,
And when did he ever suggest that using a different tool or learning html
coding might be the best approach?
However, I refuse to engage him directly...
Well from my point of view that looks rather more like self-preservation in
trying to avoid being made to look an idiot.
Your mileage may vary, but I'm sure that to more knowledgable readers he
actually manages to achieve that competently all by himself.
He has also twisted and distorted my position about the choice of using
Publisher to build webs.
No I haven't. I have simply highlighted the fact that your advice falls
somewhat short of the optimal in misleading people into thinking that
Publisher is a good tool to use by repeatedly saying that the problems it
generates are because of the failure of the user to "use it properly", which
is abject nonsense. Many people posting here are obviously just starting out
in using Publisher to make web pages - they deserve to be told that their
choice is not a good one for reasons which they are sure to discover for
themselves after spending innumerable hours going down the Publisher route.
Finally:
I have refuted each and proved them all to be spurious.
I would be really interested to hear where any of those proofs are!
(Simple disagreement does not count as proof, by the way)
ub not html. I