Display view scrambles pages that display fine in browser

Question

Help would really, really be appreciated.
I have a number of pages for a site (at
www.cognographics.com) which display perfectly in the browser.
Until recently, they also displayed perfectly in display view in
DW4. Then I replaced my PC (power surge zapped it), reinstalled
DW4, and now the same pages appear scrambled, with layers scattered
across the page, tables mixed up, etc.
Nothing changed in the code, and as I said, the pages display
fine in IE7. I know the code is not the cleanest, with some of the
styles in the CSS style sheet and others defined on the page, but
(a) the browser does not complain and (b) when I created the pages
in DW they looked fine.
I have installed DW4 on four different PCs, I've even tried
my pages in a friend's DW MX -- same result: Perfect preview in
browser, but pages are messed up in display view in DW.
I'm at my wits end -- any help would really, really be
appreciated
Thanks
Johan

Answer 1

> I downloaded several free templates
You got what you paid for, no?
> Now, how the ^!#!@#$ is this possible? And why would
these templates
> display
> fine in DW on my PC a few months ago, and now suddenly
they're screwed up?
It's entirely possible. Dreamweaver's Design view is not
nearly so
forgiving as a browser's rendering.
> I've tried an upgraded DW (MX);
Ahh right. The bad news is that DMX is just pretty awful at
rendering CSS
layouts. Unfortunately the only thing you can do about this
is to upgrade
to a more current version of DW. The Design view in DW CS4 is
perfect, for
what that's worth. This page contains all the elements that
will cause DMX
to fall down (floated containers, and absolute and relative
positioning).
Sorry about that. And since DW4 is the immediate predecessor
to DMX, it's
not going to do as well as DMX even.
Murray --- ICQ 71997575
Adobe Community Expert
(If you *MUST* email me, don't LAUGH when you do so!)
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"JohnPerth" <[email protected]> wrote in
message
news:[email protected]...
> Hi -- thanks for your comments -- much appreciated.
>
> I carefully checked the validation, but unfortunately
sorting out those
> problems didn't fix the problem.
>
> Here's the thing: I downloaded several free templates
from
>
http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com
-- including the template which I
> originally I used for my site (it's called
architecture).
>
> So, these templates have not been touched by me -- their
code is still
> 100%
> unmodified. But when I open them in Dreamweaver -- same
problem: they are
> entirely screwed up in Display view, but they render
just fine in the
> browser.
>
> Now, how the ^!#!@#$ is this possible? And why would
these templates
> display
> fine in DW on my PC a few months ago, and now suddenly
they're screwed up?
>
> You can see the magnitude of the problem. I've tried
files that have not
> been
> modified by me. I've tried an upgraded DW (MX); I've
tried both DW4 and DW
> MX
> on several different physical PCs; I've tried them on
both XP and Vista
> machines. Still the problem persists: In display view,
the pages are
> screwed
> up, while they render just fine in the browser.
>
> Where do I go from here?
>
>
>