Copy / Paste Help Continued

• See the Helpful Slide Show
• Practice Area
• HTML: The Basics Part 1
• HTML: The Basics Part 2

• It just doesn't work!!
• Script Problems
• List of Editors

I see no change in my page

Did you remember to save the changes you made?

Did you copy/upload/publish the changed page to your website?

Are you actually looking at a version of your page that was in your cache (saved Internet files on your computer)?

If you are sure that you did save it, and did publish it to your website, try pressing the 'reload' or 'refresh' button on your browser's tool bar. That is supposed to force your server to get and display a copy of the html file - exactly what the rest of the world will see when they visit your site.

If the newly cut and pasted code really does not work, try 'view' and 'source' to be sure that the on-line version of the html file you are looking at really does contain the code you are sure you pasted in.

All I see are weird characters (probably html code)

I was expecting to see my counter/link button/etc., etc. but all I got was stuff that looked like this:

and it was supposed to look like this:


What you have managed to do is to paste a representation of real html into your page - not the real code but the text representation of it. Maybe what you cut was something from an active web page. Only 'cut/copy' code from either the source of a web page or from something that explicitly says you can copy this section and paste into your web file.

This problem is more than likely not your fault - it is probably that the editor you are using is sooooo smart it knows better than you and messes things up!! Instead of using the 'smart' editor, use a really dumb editor like Notepad. Open your html file in Notepad, make the changes you want, and save the file. Then open the changed file with your smart editor for fine-tuning or 'publishing to the web'.

Frontpage/FP Express/FP 2000 and similar editors (WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get .. more or less) are a special case. Each of these editors works in a slightly different way, but they share a common general method. The 'paste' icon will paste whatever is in the clipboard (where you copied stuff to) as text and not as html code.

To 'paste' code, you need a different method. Typically for these editors, the procedure is to choose INSERT from the toolbar, and then select HTML Markup, or INSERT, then select ADVANCED then select HTML.

I get script errors

Some editors have strange ways of compressing what you 'paste' so that it turns into a very long line. HTML commands will work when they are all in a single line because the < and > characters separate each command. Javascript however is very very picky about where one line ends and the next begins. Look very carefully at the original and compare it to what has been pasted into your page.

Sometimes, when the cut and paste code contains comments, the comments get wrapped around the working code which then thinks it's part of the comment and (like all good comments) takes no part in the action. Spot the differences and fix the code :)

Click here to see typical script pasting problems. There's only one way a script will work.