Web companion problems

[Dan N.]

I am developing a web page for the Wisconsin State Chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing. I am on an iMac running OS 9.1, using Filemaker Pro 5 Unlimited and Filemaker Pro Developer. The problems are: 1. Internet Explorer realizes the pages but the pull down menues result in error messages; 2. The page functionality is different on the Windows platform and the pull down menues do not function at all; 3 Netscape does not function at all. I have activated all sharing windows and set the IP address. I also tried using Claris Web Page to allow greater control of the data base and its components. But, it would not interface with Filemaker Pro. Obviously, I am new to this and I am looking for some straight forward help.

[Keith M. Davie]

Dear Dan,

I can't help you with Instant. I don't know that you'll get much help here with that. If they had an Instant forum, I think there would be only questions.

You have at least several weeks ahead of you before you are going to find much success with Custom Publishing. You have Developer. Use the cdml reference database to try to understand the cdml tags. Their tool is pretty useless imo. If you can write html, you can write better templates than they offer. And you would be advised to not follow the examples of their templates imo. Just be advised that many of the cdml tags do not work the way FMI would have you believe. Some to be wary of are -op, .eq, -script, -scriptprefind and -scriptpresort. Don't try to run scripts without investigating the problem the single-thread engine which runs ScriptMaker has when it is confronted by near-simultaneous users on the Mult-threaded web. As far as I know, I am the only person with a workaround to that problem.

Also be aware that the examples which come with Developer rely in part on JavaScript. If you don't know that you will have a difficult time understanding the FMPro examples. Yeah, I know FMI says you just need html. Makes one wonder why their examples require JavaScript.

And the books available parrot those FMI errors.

Good luck.