Style Changes to One Page, Applies to All

FrontPage 2000 Style Sheet Slight of Hand Web site development packages like Dreamweaver, HoTMetaL, and HomeSite have brought HTML development to the masses. For the most part, these programs are able to hide the complexities of HTML code from untrained web site creators, allowing them to focus on the content more than the code. Protecting the user from HTML tags is a good thing as long as you can trust the web site development tool. But as BugNet reader Rajesh Dev discovered while using FrontPage, sometimes the development tool can be the problem instead of the solution. BugNet has confirmed a bug in Microsoft's FrontPage 2000 that will have web masters wondering why some pages get arbitrarily assigned Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets provide

web developers with a convenient way to control formatting and appearance on multiple pages. Using style sheets instead of formatting each individual element allows developers to create a consistent look and feel. Changing a style attribute within a style sheet changes it for all pages that use that style sheet. So it's a quick way to make the same change to multiple web pages. However, FrontPage 2000 inadvertently applies CSS to pages that were not supposed to have that particular style. This can be extremely frustrating for web site creators who spend hours getting the look of their web site just right, only to have FrontPage overwrite all of their changes. Active Style The problem manifests itself when the user creates Active Server Pages (ASP) in FrontPage. Microsoft introduced ASP with Internet Information Server 3.0 as a way to provide active web content that is browser independent. It is a server-side scripting environment used in creating interactive web server applications. However, when the user links to a CSS within an .asp file, FrontPage applies that style sheet to every page on the web site, even though the user specified a single page for the style. This phenomenon occurs on both .asp and on normal .htm (Microsoft's extension for .html files) pages, even if those pages hadn't originally specified a style sheet. What this means is that after building a number of .htm pages and formatting them just the way you want, applying a .css file to a single .asp file will change the look and appearance of every other .asp and .htm page on your site. This strange behavior doesn't occur when a style sheet is applied to a normal .htm file. In this case, the .css file is only inserted into the page that it was originally intended for. Style Consultant Fortunately, there are a couple of things that a user can do to prevent this problem. First, Microsoft has released a patch that is available in the latest Office 2000 Service Pack. This is a huge update so its size might discourage immediate download. For those wanting to wait before applying the patch, there are alternatives. First, you can avoid using style sheets with .asp pages. This is impractical, but will prevent style sheets from running amok on your web site. Our recommendation is to apply the .css file by coding it directly into the HTML. You can do this by opening the .asp page in FrontPage and clicking on the HTML tab at the bottom of the screen. The link should look something like this: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="StyleFileName.css"> Where StyleFileName.css is the name of the cascading style sheet file that contains the format instructions that you want to apply to this page. This defeats the purpose of having a GUI-based web site development tool, but at least it will guarantee that all of your web pages display as intended. Finally, you could upgrade to Office XP. We tested this version and found that it did not exhibit the same indiscriminate style sheets propagation.