I’m trying to display a URL in a Notes frame that points to an external website . Should be simple, right? In the frame properties I specify type as “URL” and value of “http://www.lotus.com”. When I view the frame using a windows Notes client it looks OK, but when I view the same frame using a Mac Notes client the formatting is totally messed up. It looks like it is ignoring the CSS of the website.
It’s also interesting that when I supply the URL in the designer client when I’m creating the frame it has a similar loss of formatting.
Any ideas why the Mac client would appear to be ignoring the style sheet?
Thanks for your ideas…
Subject: Try…
Have you tried open that specific URL in a browser not embedded inside Notes? Does it show correctly?
I believe that Notes 8.5.1 for Mac is using Mozilla 2.x as the browser-engine whereas you might use Mozilla 3.x outside of Notes. Note that Notes 8.5.2 should come with Mozilla 3.x engine when it is released.
I haven’t seen this issue on the Mac platform, but please note that IBM’s website might test the user agent browsing their site and create different HTML content (which includes the stylesheet links) depending on which browser engine is used. Maybe you can compare the HTML source of the browser inside and outside of Notes and see if anything related to stylesheets (and maybe even JavaScript) is changed?
Subject: No luck yet
Hi John,
Interesting thought. The URL opens fine in all the browsers I’ve tested, IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The problem comes when I reference the URL within a frame in Notes and view with a Mac client.
I’m not sure how the Mac Client is supposed to handle the URL from within a frame but it appears to be very different from a Windows client. When looking at the URL in the Windows client I can right click and view source. However, when I use a Mac Notes client to look at the same URL contained in the notes frame and right click I get a document properties window. The form in this properties window is HTMLForm and if I look at the body field I see the first few lines on the stylesheet that is from the website. I get the feeling that if the stylesheet were complete the website would look as it should.
One more data point since my posting. I took the source of the web page I’m trying to display and added it to a Notes page, marked it as passthru HTML and opened the page with the browser on the Mac. Looked good. Next I put the page in a single frame, frameset and tried to open it with the Mac. It lost most of the formatting. So it really looks like it’s a frame issue.
Thanks for your feedback!
If you have any other thoughts…
Subject: More…
Hi MIke,
Interesting thought. The URL opens fine in all the browsers I’ve tested, IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The problem comes when I reference the URL within a frame in Notes and view with a Mac client.
Which browser and versions did you test with on Mac? IE will probably be on Windows, right (unless you are using Wine or something similar)?
I’m not sure how the Mac Client is supposed to handle the URL from within a frame but it appears to be very different from a Windows client. When looking at the URL in the Windows client I can right click and view source. However, when I use a Mac Notes client to look at the same URL contained in the notes frame and right click I get a document properties window. The form in this properties window is HTMLForm and if I look at the body field I see the first few lines on the stylesheet that is from the website. I get the feeling that if the stylesheet were complete the website would look as it should.
The implementations has to be different because Notes on Windows uses Internet Explorer as per default, whereas Linux and Mac uses Mozilla 2.x. The interfaces are different, so you have to test it in a browser like Mozilla 2.x on Mac and compare it to what you see in your Mac Notes client.
If you have any other thoughts…
Have you tried opening the URL in the embedded Notes client browser without frames? “Open->Web Browser”