Modifying existing website

davidlbook · Post by **davidlbook** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 7:50 am

I'm trying to make minor changes to a website set up by someone else. There are three pages. I have copied the source code for each one and edited them, mostly just replacing text with new text. I've validated them with W3C. (That was a chore. I was using OpenOffice to edit them and I found I had to apply Default Format before saving the .odt files as .html files.)

I have uploaded the simplest of the old files (contactus.html) and it has overwritten the old one with the same name. That's all I've done, nothing else. But my browser isn't interpreting it. When I clear my cache and look at the site with Firefox, all I see on that page is the source code. Likewise when I look at it with Chrome.

I've copied the new source code from my site and run it through W3C again -- and now I get 11 errors! But it looks exactly the same. Not one character has changed. I've repeated this exercise several times, using both OpenOffice and Wordpad to save the file before uploading. Same result.

I can't make head or tail of the diagnostics from W3C. Here are the first few:

Error Line 7, Column 34: end tag for "meta" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified

<meta content="" name="keywords">

âœ‰

You may have neglected to close an element, or perhaps you meant to "self-close" an element, that is, ending it with "/>" instead of ">".
Info Line 7, Column 1: start tag was here

<meta content="" name="keywords">

Error Line 8, Column 37: end tag for "meta" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified

<meta content="" name="description">

âœ‰

You may have neglected to close an element, or perhaps you meant to "self-close" an element, that is, ending it with "/>" instead of ">".
Info Line 8, Column 1: start tag was here

<meta content="" name="description">

I'm stumped. Totally.

Wildcard · Post by **Wildcard** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 7:46 pm

Can you confirm that the file uploaded and browsing to is contactus.html and not contactus.html.txt

Also, can you post the whole source to the page, or attach the page itself if doable?

davidlbook · Post by **davidlbook** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 8:17 pm

Wildcard:

You can see it for yourself. The website in question is enigmatics.com.
At the home page, which I haven't changed, click on Contact Us.

The file I uploaded, contactus.html, was a valid html file before uploading, according to W3C. When I copy it after uploading, W3C still recognizes it as an html file, but something has changed and I get 11 errors. What has changed? Why?

Support at the hosting company, NewTek, can't help me. They've referred me to their web development branch.

Wildcard · Post by **Wildcard** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 9:07 pm

I really didn't expect this to be a legit issue.

Can you check the file permissions within FTP please? Tell me what the index and aboutus permissions are - and what perms for this one page in question is.

davidlbook · Post by **davidlbook** » Sat Feb 21, 2015 5:01 am

Wildcat . . .

No, there's no permissions problem.

To make sure of this I called the NewTek Help desk one more time and asked a representative named Chris what permissions those files have. All three have what I see at WebControlCenter: Read/Execute, and I, as Site User, have Delete permission.

But in the course of the conversation he tried copying the file onto Notepad, then back into the directory. Now it works! Somehow that cleaned up the formatting errors that were causing the problem. My browser interprets the html code properly now and I can see the modified version, and so can everyone else.

I don't understand what happened, but I think I'm finally getting down to the short strokes.

Thanks for taking the trouble to look into this.

Wildcard · Post by **Wildcard** » Sat Feb 21, 2015 4:21 pm

no worries, glad it worked out.

i am almost positive the permission thing was the problem. I think it needs to be 644 to render properly. or is it 755? It's why I wanted the other 2 files looked at.

Have a good weekend.
-WC-