TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:FrontPage98 trashes HTML docs From:Lynn Perry <clperry -at- WALLDATA -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 18 Jun 1998 16:22:14 -0700
> > Joe Sokohl wrote
> > Having spent weeks crafting a complex expandable TOC in FrontPage for
> > our online doc, imagine my consternation when FP wiped out the code.
> > Yes, it in a flash replaced all the hundreds of lines of code with a
> > simple shell--html, head, and body tags only. this has happened before,
> > but in a few not-so-egregious instances. Fortunately, IS was able to
> > produce a backup from last night (so I only have to recreate several
> > hours worth of work).
>
This also happened to my coworker. Unfortunately, IS did not have a backup.
She had to recreate the whole page. This was not the first occurrence. The
first time, she pretty much chalked up to being a novice with the tool.
Because she was learning the tool and not using it for real pages, she was
able to ignore the problem with only a small effect.
When she reported these occurrences to Microsoft, tech support said they had
never heard of this problem before, and that if the page loaded, it was not
a corrupt file. Hard to understand how the removal of all relevant HTML tags
from a page is not corruption of a file, but thats what they said.
They also said there was no way to record the problem since we could not
provide a reproducible scenario. To her credit, my coworker did not utter
the profanity that I probably would have. Instead, she reiterated how
important it would be to track these occurrences, but no luck.
I would appreciate it if Joe (and others who have experienced this failure)
would please contact me. Perhaps we can figure out a scenario that we can
pass along. Maybe we can save ourselves pain in the future. Reality for us
is that we do use FrontPage98 at this point, although I try to work
primarily in HTML and admit to using Notepad on occasion!
Thanks
LyP
clperry -at- walldata -dot- com
My opinions do not represent Wall Data's and vice versa.