HTML Control of the results page

[Lee Jordan]

Hi guys,
Noob here.

Is there anyway of changing the HTML of the search results page? If you notice the numbered list which is being displayed is nothing more than a series of self closing divs and it introduces tags which aren't needed or even valid in some cases.

Ideally this should be marked up as an ordered list with

<a href="#endsearch" class="skip">Skip Results</a>
  <ol id="resultslist"></ol>
<hr id="endsearch" />

and an li for each result

<li><a href="#" class="title">Result Title:</a><p>Description</p><a href="" class="url">www...</a></li>

around each search result.

CSS can then be used as follows to style the results:

#resultslist {
 list-style : roman;
}
#resultslist li {
 line-height : 1.4em;
}

#resultslist li a:hover {
 text-decoration : underline;
}

#resultslist li p {
 color : #666;
}

Incorrect markup makes the web a horrid place, correct use of markup is next to godliness. To be honest the lack of control over HTML is crippling my ability to use this product and justify purchasing it. Any ideas?

[Ray]

Are you looking at an old V4 copy of the software? Since you are posting in the V4 forum, I presume this may be the case.

The HTML output was revamped in V5 and everything is specified in <div> tags which allow for much greater control via CSS. There are no longer any unnecessary tags, and definitely no invalid tags used. We went out of our way to utilize correct markup and it validates as XHTML 1.0.

The old V4 HTML markup featured a mix of older layout/appearance tags because at the time of its release, many of our users were still unfamiliar with CSS and we wanted the results to appear as decent as possible for those beginner users as well. In V5, we have made the switch over to a more CSS dependent output, as it has become much more assumed knowledge.

Some information on how the CSS is specified in V5 can be found here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/css.html

[Lee Jordan]

Hi Raymond,

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I've got version 4 here, but it's not the CSS I wish to interact with, I wish to replace the div's with li tags and put some structure into the HTML. The div tags are perfectly valid and are a valid option, but they are the wrong tags for the task at hand. Divs create sections on a page, what we have here is a list of search results, which should be marked up using a list element.

I'd like to create my own HTML template for the search results in effect. CSS is defacto standard, something which isn't even thought of but bad markup creates bad CSS. We then wouldn't have to rely on classes in the CSS.

Really an ordered list (<ol>) should be used as a base structure for displaying the results. It seems to display the numbers they are being displayed by some kind of loop in the CGI however, the OL tag will put those numbers in for you.

I've noticed in the CGI there are some HTML references but it seems messy to start chopping out div tags in that file. Perhaps if there was an interface in the software itself to aid this, that would be great.

It's the lack of control over the HTML which is the issue I have, rather than CSS.

[David]

Due to cross posting of the same issue to the V5 forum, this thread is closed.