Hey, web gurus! I'm having trouble with a web form. Help?

[Piratecat]

Greetings, O wise ones.

My actual work site is poised to be used: www.shiftschedule.us

Problem is, that form at the bottom only works on some systems. On other systems, it triggers an email - and doesn't pick up the form info at all! As I have a mailer hitting TODAY, I need to get this damn thing straightened out ASAP. Can anyone please offer me some advice?

Thanks!

 

[orbitalfreak]

I'm nowhere near being a web guru, but I don't see a form anywhere on the page. Or is that the problem? Either way, *bump* as well.

 

[Drawmack]

P Kitty,
what form? there is no form on that page?

also use   not &nbsp

Additionally you may want to run your page through this http://validator.w3.org/ right now it doesn't validate because you have not specified the doctype.

and your border around your inset table doesn't look to hot in Netscape because it doesn't recognize bordercolor as an attribute on table tags but you can over come this by using css.

see there is a reason I get paid to do this.

 

[Drawmack]

and HTML tidy found 118 errors with your html as well.

 

[Piratecat]

Doh! (contact) took it out. I'll ask him to temporarily restore the old doc as a hidden subfolder; I'll let you know when it is up.

In general, what would make a form not actually transmit the data?

Drawmack, will you please email me at the address linked below? You're good at this. The site was designed in Dreamweaver, and runs fine in my browser, but 118 errors?!? I must know more.

 

[(contact)]

I assume HTML tidy is a utility that cleans up HTML formatting?

Thanks for the link to the W3C validation page, Drawmack-- that's nifty.

If anyone's interested at checking out the form (we took it down until we can get a working version up), it can be found at: shiftschedule.us/form.htm.

 

[MJEggertson]

I'm not clear on what you're trying to do. Your form has a mailto uri for the action attribute, which means the data will not actually be sent anywhere. Most browsers will see the mailto protocol and open up a mail client which will contain the form data, addressed to the target email address. For you to actually get the data, the user will still have to mail it!

I'll offer some help, but I'm not sure what you're trying to do. The form works fine, but I have a feeling you actually want it do something else...what kind of facilities do you have for handling the data? What is the end script that accepts the data?

 

[Drawmack]

I assume HTML tidy is a utility that cleans up HTML formatting?

yeah and tag checking and such. Basically it gets rid of all the sloppyness that browsers allow.

Thanks for the link to the W3C validation page, Drawmack-- that's nifty.

np code validation should be the second step of testing a page, right aafter you run it through html tidy and take care of all those errors. I use a version of html tidy that's wrapped into my editing tool called html-kit and available for free from http://www.download.com

If anyone's interested at checking out the form (we took it down until we can get a working version up), it can be found at: shiftschedule.us/form.htm.

I took a look at it and my guess as to why it's not doing what you expect is that you're trying to use html 3.2 specific tags in an html 4.0 document. You really shouldn't even be using html anymore but should be using xhtml more information is available at http://www.w3c.org

For a form like this I recomend backing up with php that can scrub the data and everything. It'll work a let better for both P. Kitty and the end user. I have sent P. Kitty info on my services via email.

 

[Psionicist]

Slick webpage.

I'd suggest to set the TD VALIGN="TOP" property on the part of the table where the menu is:

Autumn Seminar
> agenda
> hotel reservations
> cancellation policy

Request Information

To answer the original question, I can see you run IIS 5.0, so you can probably run ASP scripts. Long time since I did anything in ASP (I prefer PHP) but any knowledgeable ASP-coder might code a neat script with JMail or CDONTS for you.

 

[andrew]

The site was designed in Dreamweaver, and runs fine in my browser, but 118 errors?!? I must know more.

There are plenty of resources available to get good, standards compliant code out of Dreamweaver. The Dreamweaver task force is a good place to start: http://www.webstandards.org/act/campaign/dwtf/mxassessed.html

Macromedia's DevNet has a good followup article: http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/dreamweaver/articles/code_standards.html

These should get you started on the path to clean code with Dreamweaver.