HTMLPad 2005 Pro has problems with Preview

mmo · Post by **mmo** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 1:58 pm

I am using the newest HTMLPad (2005 Pro / V6.3.0.57) on Win XP (SP2++) with IE 6 as viewer (a pretty standard plain vanilla setup I would guess).

When I edit a plain HTML file in split screen mode then VERY often (I'ld say more often than not), the preview displays an error message:

The page cannot be displayed

"The page you are looking for is currently unavailable bla bla" and
other endless explanations and hints here...

Cannot find server or DNS Error
Internet Explorer

This happens, even if the HTML code is perfectly valid and if I somehow trigger a repaint (e.g. by clicking on "Split Screen Hor" when I had previously been using "Split Screen Ver" or vice versa) the page is displayed fine.

This is most annoying, since again and again, while writing or after saving a page the preview shortly appears and is correctly displayed just to disappear again a few seconds later and redisplay the error page again.

Alas, clicking the refresh-button above the preview does NOT reload and display the page properly.

Any ideas, what could cause this?

Michael

Post by **Karlis** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 5:49 pm

Michael, I have never seen this behavior, but it seems that this might be somehow connected with your IE configuration, since the editor uses Internet Explorer to display the internal preview.

You may try following:
1) Disable IE add-ins, restart everything and then see whether it has improved
2) Change IE document caching settings. Try "every visit to page".
3) In Preferences, increase auto-refresh setting to some 10 seconds or more

Any feedback will be appreciated.

By the way do you use mappings or web server preview?

Post by **chrisjlocke** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 7:39 pm

Interesting. I was going to post today that the preview pane has still got hiccups, but was going to see if it was already posted.

Quick steps to reproduce:
Create an HTML document with split screen preview. Type some text. Preview pane is updated automatically. Save the document. Click the 'refresh' icon in the split screen window. Preview vanishes. Clicking refresh again does nothing. Change some text in the code window, and the preview window is updated correctly.

I don't know if this is related to the above problem though...

mmo · Post by **mmo** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 8:35 pm

Hi Karlis,

admin wrote:...
You may try following:
1) Disable IE add-ins, restart everything and then see whether it has improved
2) Change IE document caching settings. Try "every visit to page".
3) In Preferences, increase auto-refresh setting to some 10 seconds or more
...

I first tried 2 & 3 and that helped nothing. I then went into the add-ons and disabled about 10 (of maybe 25) that I assumed are less relevant and - voila - things seem much better now. Next step would now of course be to figure out, which of those was the actual culprit, but that exercise may take a while. I fear, this will have to wait till past my holidays...

Thanks and cheers,
Michael

Post by **Karlis** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 4:36 pm

OK, let me know...

Post by **chrisjlocke** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 5:05 pm

Just to add ... the CSS preview is much worse than the HTML preview. Just fiddling with CSS, and it was blanking quite a lot of the time.

Post by **Karlis** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 8:34 pm

chrisjlocke,

Today I checked it again - on various computers, I also surveyed some of our most active testers. It seems to work fine for everybody else.

Now, we must find out how is your system config differrent from oust others. Do you have any ideas?

Post by **chrisjlocke** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 8:39 pm

Nope, but I can do an example in 'Wink' like I have before, if you want. That won't prove much, but will show you what I'm doing...

When the page is blank, I presume its a file like prev39~.htm its using. These seem to be appearing a lot, of late.

mmo · Post by **mmo** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:29 pm

Hi all,

I just went through the rather longish exercise of disabling more and more plugins until I had switched off each and every plugin (even all MS built-in plugins like the updater and search) and - alas - I still have this strange phenomenon of getting "The page cannot be displayed..." errors. Maybe the effect appears now a bit less frequent but still often enough to be annoying, if not to say, unusable.

So it seems, my initial observation, that the effect appeared to have gone after disabling only a subset of my plugins was just a non-reproducible coincidence.

Any other ideas what else could I test or try out to get rid of this?

Michael

Post by **chrisjlocke** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:45 pm

Not sure why, but the error "Cannot find server or DNS Error" is moaning about not finding a site - possibly due to a URL in the HTML.
You're not using a form POST or linking to some bizarre site are you? Do you use explicit URLs (eg, http://mysite.com/path/filename.htm) or relative links (just myfile.htm) ?

mmo · Post by **mmo** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 5:11 pm

Only a couple of relative URLs in the form <img src="images/foo.gif"> ", i.e. on the page I am referring to a couple of embedded images which all sit in a subdirectory "images" in the same directory.

It's a static HTML page, there are no other URLs on that page, no form, absolutely nothing special I'ld say...

Michael

Post by **chrisjlocke** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 5:22 pm

I get a blank page, rather than an error. Hmm. Not sure what to suggest to try.
When it happens, the preview file could be examined to see if it contains any corrupt HTML, or given to Internet Explorer to open. If that opens it fine, then its some setting somewhere within the application.

mmo · Post by **mmo** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 12:05 pm

Since the display always disppears 3-5 seconds after the last save: could this be some timing issue, i.e. could it be that IE always reads or refreshes this while it is still being locked or written to?

This is soooo annoying!!!

I am starting to consider some alternative HTML editor - or maybe I'll have to seriously fiddle with these Preview-options first...

Post by **Karlis** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 3:16 pm

Obviously this is something specific to your particular computers, I would appreciate the wink demo, however as I say, I am not able to get this happen here. If I could repeat it, I could also fix the problem.

To help explore, I would suggest you to right-click on the blank or error page and see what is displayed under the Properties. There should be an URL. If there is a valid URL (file actually exists at that URL), this means it is some Internet Explorer problem...or something related to it.

In the future releases we plan to allow you to disable the automatic refresh, this will help you not seeing the error page but you will have to click refresh toolbar button to refresh the preview.

Post by **chrisjlocke** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 3:31 pm

Hmm. Ok. Just did a Wink demo to show. Didn't realise you could right click the preview window.

Think I know whats going on. Maybe.
Created a new HTML document. The preview file was prev0~.htm. Saved this, and refreshed, and it was blank - but prev0~.htm no longer exists. Type in the code editor, and the preview appears again ... but now its prev1~.htm. File save ... edit ... and now its prev2~.htm.

The preview is therefore not being told of the new filename when you click 'save'. In fact, there is no .htm file to preview, until you edit the document again.

Hope that makes more sense.

I'm guessing there is an 'don't keep renaming files' option somewhere...