[pmwiki-users] Re: Formatting help?

Sat Oct 15 19:08:14 CDT 2005

On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 06:58:08AM +0000, Graham Poole wrote:
> So I seem to have found the problem.
> I'm guessing the host changed their banner code lately,
> and now FireFox reads it improperly.
> Somehow, IE reads it correctly (weird, I know).
> 
> The issue occurs at this point in the page source,
> right at the end of the banner code:
> 
> <SCRIPT language='JavaScript'>
> // <!--
> ...
> document.write('<script type="text/javascript"
> src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
> </script>');
> }
> // -->
> </SCRIPT>
> 
> The second-last /script is read and closes off the initial SCRIPT,
> as opposed to the script command directly before it.
> (I know this because FireFox highlights certain parts of page sources)
> This means the if statement isn't finished properly and
>       '); } // -->    gets ouput as plain text.

Your provider has the <SCRIPT> syntax incorrect.

The purpose of the  comment here is to hide the script
data from browsers that don't understand the <SCRIPT> tag.  Fine,
but your provider got the placement of the "//" wrong -- the "//"
should go only after the closing "-->" and not before the leading 
"<!--".  In other words, the <SCRIPT> tag should be formatted
like this:

    <SCRIPT language='JavaScript'>
    <!--
    ...
    document.write('<script type="text/javascript"
    src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
    </script>');
    }
    // -->
    </SCRIPT>

Note that there's no "//" before the leading "<!--".  This syntax 
was taken directly from the W3C HTML 4 specification on "Hiding 
script data from user agents", at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/scripts.html#h-18.3.2 .

> Somehow this exact code works fine on non-pmwiki pages...
> Any ideas why?  Or how to fix it?

I'm not exactly sure why it works in non-pmwiki pages but not
in pmwiki ones -- it may have something to do with slight
differences in the structure of the pages, or perhaps because
PmWiki is running some other javascript components before the
<body> tag (whereas the non-pmwiki pages are not).

At any rate, I'd see if you can get your hosting service to
fix this bug in their code and if that resolves the problem.

Pm