Ok I give up...what's the secret?

[deborah stefani]

I consider myself very well versed in using html code. I've spent most of my precious time today trying to get the HTML EDITOR to follow simple commands such as <td valign="top"> -AND- creating TABLES because word wrap around an image doesn't work.

I've used NING many times before where dropping an image into a page with alignment command "left" and word wrap worked without any effort.

What am I missing? Never had these issues before.

Here's one page. Unable to move text more to the top. http://branchanewbeginning.ning.com/page/about-branch

[George H. Compton IV]

More than likely it's  the change from HTML 4 to HTML 5 they changed it at the beginning of this year. all my old HTML codes had to be updated.

even the old simple font codes are changed. 

To see all the  Tag changes that work and the ones that don't work in HTML 5 go to this webpage.

http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_reference.asp

[Erik Woods]

George: you're on the right track but I'm afraid that's not likely to be the cause for Deborah's problems.

When you look at that tag reference on W3C's site, it is important to note that even though HTML5 specifications don't support certain tags, browsers will still know how to render them.

HTML5 is the same HTML that has been around since HTML 4.2 and even earlier. The difference is that in the HTML5 specifications, they've introduced new tags which are more semantic, and some tags which support new features in browsers natively.

For example: If you were using the <strike> or <center> tags in an HTML5 document, the browser would still treat them as they always have, as far as default styles are concerned. The difference is that if the web document contains deprecated (unsupported) elements, it simply does not validate. And that is where the importance lies.

Valid code and working code are two different things. You can use all the deprecated tags in the world and for the most part, your sites will still work as expected. It will be dirty and not very friendly to screen readers but it will work. The documentation that exists on W3C is a guide for how to write more semantic and accessible code.

The problem Deborah is seeing is likely due to an update to the editor used for content on the Ning platform. I think they use Tiny MCE. If Ning updated the version of Tiny MCE, there is a chance that some of the features in the editor have been changed. There's also a chance that the Ning platform handles certain types of tags differently. I myself am a very experienced developer and Tiny MCE still gives me problems providing unexpected results from time to time.

The other explanation might be additional styles added by Ning to reset certain browsers. I've only been involved with Ning since August 2011 and I haven't been keeping up to date with their updates, but this might be something they changed at some point, making old code style differently than before they made the update.

After looking at your page, Deborah, I see that adding vertical-align: top; or vertical-align: middle; as a style to that <td> on the right will fix your problem. This may have been part of Ning's recent updates that George speaks of - they may have added some reset styles which give explicit styles to the <td> tag.

This may not be the best fix but I didn't have a ton of time, and it works. You can add it inline (<td style="vertical-align: top;">) or make a class for it if you want and you know how.

[deborah stefani]

Hey, thanks guys, really appreciate it.

I guess I come from the old school where, if it works, don't fix it.

X my fingers and hope it works.

[George H. Compton IV]

 LOL I'm old school that way myself :-) I was not a happy camper when HTML 5 came out.

HTML 4 was working Perfectly..

but they do have a lot of exciting new changes in HTML 5 worth the time to learn the new codes :-)

You have a great day Deborah

[Erik Woods]

George, that's the thing. HTML was/is still a work in progress. It WAS broken. And so they are fixing it.

If you can't understand why, between what I've already said above and what I'm saying now, then I would suggest doing some research. Anyone who wants to succeed in web design or related fields needs to embrace change, whether they like it or not. If you don't like it, you can join certain mailing lists and become an active member, making suggestions on how to make it better or why you don't want certain things changed.

Remember: HTML5 is still in development. The specifications are not completely drafted yet.

Also remember what I said up above - there's no diff between older versions of HTML and HTML5 other than they added native support for things like video and audio and a few other things - along with adding more semantic tags to describe our HTML documents.

When Ning makes a change to their site, don't jump to conclusions that it's "HTML5" - this particular change was likely to be a CSS issue (as you can see, I fixed Deborah's problem with CSS and she is still using tables for it).

[Erik Woods]

Looks like my fix worked? I'm glad. :)