Visual Basic Concepts

HTML Tips and Tricks for DHTML Applications

See Also

The following are items to be aware of as you create and work with HTML in the DHTML page designer:

• If your page contains a CHARSET tag, this tag will be stripped out when the page is read into the designer. This should not cause a problem in most pages.
  
  
• The column widths you see in tables within the designer may not match the column widths you see when you run your page in the browser. You may be able to avoid this problem either by setting your column widths in percentages rather than pixels, or by making sure the left-most column does not have a width measurement set for it.
  
  
• Do not assign ID property values with greater than 117 characters. If you do, you may receive an error when running your application.
  
  
• If the first paragraph element on your page does not contain text and is followed by another HTML element, you may see unexpected results if you delete the first <P> tag. In this case, other elements on the page may also be deleted.
  
  
• You may receive inconsistent results when trying to delete a DIV tag using the designer's treeview panel. If you have trouble deleting a DIV tag, use the Launch Editor function and remove the <DIV> and </DIV> tags manually.
  
  
• You may have difficulty working with table cells that do not contain text—borders will not appear for these cells, and if the whole table is empty, you will not be able to delete the table. You can force a table border to appear for empty cells in your tables by placing a <BR> tag in each unused table cell.
  
  
• Property values set for the TITLE element on your HTML page may not persist in the property grid after you run the project. However, if you examine the HTML source code in the browser you will see that your title properties are still present in the HTML stream.
  
  
• Elements on a page are always anchored by the upper left corner. Therefore, if you resize the element by stretching the top or left borders, you will see an element of the size you indicated when you release the mouse pointer but it will still be positioned from the original top, left corner. You can avoid unexpected results by first positioning your control with the upper left corner in the appropriate place, then sizing it correctly.
  
  
• You may have difficulty removing font formatting from some elements. For example, if you add an H1 heading to your page, press ENTER, and type a few sentences below it, the paragraph will receive the same formatting as the heading—that is, it will appear large and in bold. You cannot remove this formatting using the bold icons on the formatting toolbar. Remove it either by using the Launch Editor feature and manually correcting the formatting tags, or by changing the style of the selected text in the designer to Normal.
  
  
• For a check box HTML element, a property called "Indeterminate" is used to set the check box to a grayed-out state. However, if you set this property to True and then click the check box to move it to the blank state, the Indeterminate property does not reset to False. You can reset it manually or click a third time to reset the value.
  
  
• For absolutely positioned controls with Height and Width properties that appear in the Properties window, you cannot resize the control by changing the values of those properties directly. Instead, resize the control by dragging one of its borders in the designer.
  
  
• If you insert an input image element onto your page from the HTML toolbox, then use the Shape property to change it from another shape to a polygon, you will receive an error.