I have a small problem that concerns an outsourced website development company who will not (for perfectly normal and valid reason) allow us access to the server to alter stylesheets. I've been tasked to redesign a website layout. Problem is, I cannot access the website nor a dev environment to alter the stylesheets to bring forth these ideas. Only route to this would be to create a local custom.css to send via email to the person who uploads them. However, I cannot in good faith just throw them a CSS file to be applied on a live site without fully cross-browser checking it and I cannot do this locally on IE, Safari or Opera.
One solution was to save the website locally as HTML (file, save as...) but the problem is the background CMS is complete crap, meaning it has like 200 completely unnescessary CSS files and it is organized as:
main.css has 7 #import rules with relative paths.
Inside this is another stylesheet with 16 #import rules with relative paths.
Inside this... You get the picture.
This would mean I would have to shift through these 200 import rules and files to download them manually via the address bar. So my question is:
How can I save this website as HTML to my computer to apply a custom user stylesheet file to it so I can cross-browser test it properly? Is there some website that can go through a site and compress all the CSS to one file or smth?
You can download a whole website with dependencies using programs like HTTrack
http://www.httrack.com/
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.
WinHTTrack is the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release.
It doesn't consolidate all the CSS files into one, but it is better to retain the files as-is if you want to minimize changes
Related
I originally transferred this project from windows to linux, and it was working completely fine on windows, but now images are not loading.
I have an image:
<img src="/assets/s1.png" alt="dinosaur">
And it is only loading on the webpage if I change the filepath to /home/user/Desktop/Project/assets/s1.png
The image file is in the folder assets and the assets folder and html file are both within the Project folder.
The weird thing is that when I change /home/user/Desktop/Project/assets/s1.png to /Desktop/Project/assets/s1.png it stops working. I would like to be able to only include the necessary path /assets/s1.png because I will need the path to stay the same if this project gets moved around between environments.
Based on a comment on the question:
the address of the page is file:///home/user/Desktop/Project/file.tpl
That's the problem then. The "root" of the "web server" (from the browser's perspective) is the root of the file system. So this absolute path won't work:
<img src="/assets/s1.png" alt="dinosaur">
But this one will:
<img src="/home/user/Desktop/Project/assets/s1.png" alt="dinosaur">
However, that latter one clearly won't be helpful in a web-hosted environment.
You can instead use a relative path, for example:
<img src="./assets/s1.png" alt="dinosaur">
This should work in the example given, but we can't know if this will have further implications in a larger and more complex web application. For example, if you're dynamically loading sections or templates from different folders, their "relative paths" may be different. (That's one advantage of absolute paths, they're the same regardless of what page you're on.)
But more to the root cause of the problem... You really shouldn't be testing a web page from the file system. The intent is to host it on a web server, so the testing should be hosted on a web server.
It makes little sense to make changes to the code in order to get it to work in an environment that will never be used, only to probably have to make more changes to get it to work in the actual target environment. Keep the test environment and the target environment as similar as possible.
Just wondering how/why this works, when I'm making a simple html file and linking in some css, then dragging my html file into the browser, no static web server is needed for me to view the file.
Why is that so..
I'm looking at my browser's network tab, and no request is made for the css file, and my browser still displays it perfectly..
Is there a way to do without a static file server on the web for html, css, js files, like when dragging and dropping a file into a browser?
Just going back and requestionning basics here..
Thanks in advance!
Because the link to your CSS file is relative, and your CSS file is accessible locally. Browsers can be used to access local files, not just files on the Internet.
When working with links, you may see just the name of the file referenced, as such:
Link
This is known as a relative link. file.html is relative to wherever the document is that is linking to it. In this case, the two files would be in the same folder.
There's a second type of link, known as an absolute URL, where the full path is specified.
Consider a typical absolute website link:
Link
With a local file, this would essentially be:
Link
The file protocol can be used to access local files.
Considering both the homepage (presumably index.html) and file.html would live in the same folder on both a web server and your local machine, Link would work for either scenario. In fact, with a relative link, the location of the second file is automatically determined based on the location of the first file. In my example, index.html would live at file://[YOUR WEBSITE]/index.html, so your browser is smart enough to known to look in file://[YOUR WEBSITE]/ when searching for any relative URLs.
Note that the same scenario applies to any other file! <link> and <script> tags will look for files in the exact same way -- that includes your stylesheet :)
Hope this helps!
Sounds like you are new to HTML and web development.
It all has to do with relative versus absolute file paths.
Check out these articles and have fun coding! Always remember that Google is your friend, improve your search-foo and you will not have to ask questions like this.
God speed.
http://www.geeksengine.com/article/absolute-relative-path.html
http://www.coffeecup.com/help/articles/absolute-vs-relative-pathslinks/
How to properly reference local resources in HTML?
I am pretty new to web design, so this may be a very elementary question. I have a folder where I have multiple HTML files for a simple web page, I also have CSS style sheets and JPGs for the web backgrounds. I want to send the sample website to my friends via email, but there are about 10 files in a folder. Is there any way to bundle them to make it simpler for a non-programmer to open and view the website?
In short: No.
You should really just send them a zip folder containing the different HTML files, CSS files, and images. That way they can just decompress the zip, open up the default document (i'm guessing index.html) and view the website locally on their machine. If you'd like further explanation please let me know.
I apologize in advance for the generic examples of this since the issue is with a proprietary corporate system.
I support a web app that allows for edits to a secondary CSS file in order to style the page (within the limits of the application). I'm trying to apply a non-standard font that is used company wide but I do not have access to edit the HTML or header of the site, only the CSS. I tried declaring the font-family in the main CSS while referencing the actual font file URLs (since they are used on our corporate site) but they never actually loaded.
I then took the same font-family snippet and created a separate CSS file for just the font declaration and changed the URL to point to the actual files in the relative path (ex: url('fonts/DINWeb.woff') ). I moved this fonts.css file along with the reference font files (eot, ttf,and woff versions) to a public Dropbox folder for testing. I was able to get everything working by simply importing the fonts.css file using the line of code below (URL modified) at the top of my application's CSS.
#import url('https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/.../fonts.css');
The problem is that the Dropbox solution was just for temporary testing purposes. Once I confirmed everything worked as expected, I moved the exact folder structure to an external hosting location that is approved for use. When I update my import code in the CSS to the new URL, the font does not load. I can access the CSS file and the font files from my browser without any issue so I don't understand why the web app fails to load it. I also have images hosted in this same hosting location that pull into the web app without an issue, it's only the font that has issues. The files work when hosted on Dropbox but not the other source. I've also double checked the references for the URL and they are still correct since the folder structure never changed.
Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated. Ideally I would like to just reference the corporate URLs directly in the web app's CSS like I initially tried. If that will not be possible, I need it to work with the externally hosted files since Dropbox cannot be used as the permanent solution.
Basically you cannot load from one domain resources hosted in other domain, unless the second host says that you can. See CORS
You can solve it by moving everything to the same domain (or forcing the user to be always in certain domain) or by adding the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to the responses.
You can achieve this last thing if you can edit an .htaccess file in the server. Add:
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
Or replace the * with the domain from which you'll be making the requests.
Yes, a subdomain is a different domain (abc.com, www.abc.com and dl.abc.com are not the same).
I am working with a web site that uses absolute paths to files but does not specify a domain. A link to /public_html/images/image1.jpg is coded as "/images/image1.jpg", a link to the home page is coded simply as "/". This is done so that the site can be deployed and maintained on multiple domains.
The problem I'm having is with testing the HTML files by opening them on a PC. Because the base location is coded as "/", the browser assumes all the files and directories are in the root of the C drive.
Is there a way to simulate the site on a Windows PC so that all images and CSS are loaded correctly? I thought about creating a new partition and putting everything in the root of that partition but wanted to know if there was an easier way.