Site broken in dreamweaver, works otherwise (in browser) [URGENT]

[origen]

**I Request this as Urgent because I am waiting to be admitted to the hospital, and really don't have much time to get this all through the door before I'll be out of commision. Thanks in advance!**

Hello again, gods of CSS!

My current client's site is being templated up, as I have to make it work in four languages. There were some hairy moments trying to get the drop-downs to work (and thusly, my CSS is somewhat frankensteined). As of now, everything is hunky-dory, except in Dreamweaver.

I know DW is frowned upon, but coding is a happenstance, I'm actually a graphic designer, so that 'split' view helps quite a bit. Everything in 'split' is horribly broken, and only amends itself in Live View (something that even I won't use). I have a sneaking suspicion there's something fundamentally wrong with my franken-css which is ruining the display, especially the leftCol (left nav with rollovers) and rightCol (main content area). What I'll post isn't the full site, I'm essentially stopping before things get too messy - but it's enough for someone to analyze the CSS.

http://www.pixelbloq.com/web/corbett...indextest.html this is the site so far..

this is the mockup of the completed site proper.
corbett_design_new.jpg

[TehYoyo]

So...what do you want us to do?

Fix Dreamweaver?

Looks great/works fine from here.

~TehYoyo

[origen]

Thanks, yoyo!
It was more a question of 'is my css or html implementation of said css horrible'. I know DW will always be buggy, but when I open it up in Split mode (no live view, inspector active etc. etc) it's so drastically misaligned that I get a gnawing feeling the styles are buggered. Keeping in mind I still need an actual text container (that would go in the rightCol div) followed by a footer..

[RyanReese]

You should know that the design view in Dreamweaver is based on a VERY old version of Opera, and should not be taken seriously. *Noone* uses that browser for surfing nowadays.

If you want to see how it looks in browsers, you need to actually open up a browser and open the file up . Don't even trust split view. Still based on the old crappy Opera version.

[ralph.m]

As others have said, forget about how the site looks in Dreamweaver. That's irrelevant. What counts is how it looks in browsers. If it works there, then you are fine ... although it's still a good idea to make your code as clean and standards-compliant as possible.

It's better to test your site in real browsers at each step and forget you ever heard about design view in Dw. Many people build a site using that alone and then get confused when it doesn't work in browsers. It's like a car that seemed to work fine in the design studio but falls to bits when you take it out on the open road. Well, obviously it should have been tested on the road in the first place, where it will be used.

[RyanReese]

Partly why I never wanted to use Dreamweaver, even with it available. The only functionality it'd provide me was text indentation for easy to read code.

Straight up Notepad is the way to go .

[origen]

Thanks for all the confirmations, guys. Appreciated.

[ralph.m]

Good luck with your hospital visit! Hope it all goes well.

[Stomme poes]

You know, I understand completely the OP's fear. Sure, it looks okay in the browsers s/he has tested, but older Opera... it's not THAT old Opera! It shouldn't look totally b0rked, even if it is Dreamweaver.

It's like this one time where I had a site looking all hunky-dory except IE6 (or 5!) was showing something retarded. I thought first, oh, it's IE... but later, it turned out to be a real error in my HTML (not CSS) and IE was simply the only browser sensitive to it!

So I'd say when the OP comes back from hospital, to indeed ask someone to go through the frankencode (*after the OP validates the HTML etc*) and double-echeck things. If stuff looks okay in current browsers then there's time to let it just run... but check when there's time, since some browser, somewhere, is going to do what DW is doing, I think. Or, I would not feel confortable unless I knew there was a certain DW error causing the problem. If that were the case, then I'd be totally okay with forgetting DW, since as everyone else pointed out, users don't surf the web in DW :)

[RyanReese]

I don't know what version of Opera it is, but dreamweaver has been aroudn for a few years, and considering how many new versions of Opera are released every so often, it's pretty old.

Opera users tend to upgrade fairly fast anyway. They are good about taht .

[TehYoyo]

I just thought of this. An obvious way, to me, of fixing the problem of seeing if your CSS is broken is to just validate it. If it comes out fine, then great!

If it still comes out weird, then it's just a problem of something you did or a weird value, etc.

~TehYoyo

[deathshadow60]

Doesn't work in DW -- shocked, so shocked... No wait, not shocked... what's the opposite of shocked? grounded?

Given that half the pages I've ever written can be loaded into that steaming pile of manure, you hit 'save', and now it's broken; OH NOES, it doesn't work in Dreamweaver, NOT THAT!?!?

You want split view, open the text editor, make it half the screen width, open a browser, make it half the screen width... Win 7 makes that REALLY easy with it's "drag off the side to make it half width".

Do yourself a favor, burn the manuals, make microwave art out of the DVD, and forget that bloated overpriced nube predating scam even exists. As a dearly departed friend of mine often said, "the only thing about Dreamweaver that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it's use."

Word of real advice (as opposed to jokes about how bad DW is), get yourself the ENTIRE content marked up semantically on the page BEFORE you start trying to build that layout in markup. SERIOUSLY. Doesn't look TOO bad so far apart from that stupid mm_ javascript nonsense DW craps all over pages with to do CSS' job, but it's hard to tell without real content or at least a reasonable facsimile of it. My biggest concern would be the comment placements that could trip rendering bugs in older versions of IE and FF... and when comments are the biggest immediate issue... big deal.

Though I'd suggest ditching the universal reset since that's going to shtup you on forms, don't make it an accessibility train wreck with the fixed width layout, avoid declaring widths on everything... and WHY do you have the HTML CDATA escape wrapping a second copy of your CSS in the external file? Or more specifically the second reset -- AHA! you're running the universal reset TWICE - That could be causing your problems right there. When you call it before the NAV ones you are undoing all the margins and padding above it!

[Stomme poes]

Off Topic:

make microwave art out of the DVD

Waste of a perfectly good microwave. Magnetrons don't like getting their waves bounced back at them.

My uncle would make mobiles out of spam discs, and hang them outside. Drove the birds nuts. Was very awesome.