Giving DTD (document type definitions the boot?

[Paul Tobin]

Greetings to Those in the Know,

First of all I am a total Newbie.

Secondly, I hope I'm in the right place.

Here's my problem:

Recently I began to have a problem printing pages from Web sites. For
example, today I wanted to print a receipt for an order I placed with
Dog.com. The print out did not resemble the receipt at all but came
out in pages and pages of DTD which I assume is some kind of code.
Please tell me how I can get Web pages to print out in a readable
normal format like they always did? I have no idea why this started
happening.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Paul

[Peter Flynn]

Post by Paul Tobin
Greetings to Those in the Know,

Bonjour :-)

Post by Paul Tobin
First of all I am a total Newbie.

No matter, we all started as newbies.

Post by Paul Tobin
Secondly, I hope I'm in the right place.

If you have questions about SGML, yes.

Post by Paul Tobin
Recently I began to have a problem printing pages from Web sites. For
example, today I wanted to print a receipt for an order I placed with
Dog.com. The print out did not resemble the receipt at all but came
out in pages and pages of DTD which I assume is some kind of code.
Please tell me how I can get Web pages to print out in a readable
normal format like they always did? I have no idea why this started
happening.

This is probably not really anything to do with SGML or XML or HTML as
such; more to do with sloppy programming. But it may be related to SGML
or XML if the page really did contain DTD markup (unusual).

It may be one of several things; the first two which come to mind are:

a) perhaps the programmer of the site failed to bind the page to the
correct MIME Content Type. This is simply a bug in the design of their
system, which transmits the page to you with incorrect information about
how your browser should handle it.

b) or perhaps the page was sent correctly, but you were using a browser
which is badly designed or configured, so it didn't know how to handle
the page, and defaulted to giving you the raw text, markup and all.

You don't say what browser you were using, but the general consensus
these days (and my own recommendation) is to use Firefox.

If you can re-access that page, please do two things:

1. Save a copy to your hard disk.

2. Access it using a browser that gives you information about how the
page was transmitted. In Firefox this is under the Tools|Page Info menu.

Let us know the answer to [2]. Don't post the saved file from [1] here
in public, but if you want to send it to me to have a look, feel free to
do so and it will remain confidential.

If you can't re-access that page, there is probably very little we can
do to help, although you may want to copy this reply to the customer
service email address on their web site. PetsUnited LLC, the owners of
dogs.com, are very careful not to supply any other contact information,
so it may be that they are not really interested in hearing from
customers with problems.

///Peter