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Cache Page Design


Green Achers

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It's been a while since I've read chatter about designing cache pages. Since one of our local CVC cachers asked about adding backgrounds to cache pages, it got me thinking... Who does improve the basic Cache Page?

 

There's no requirement to go beyond the basic page. However, we all appreciate it when someone does spend a few extra minutes (or hours in some cases) by adding HTML to their cache submission/modification.

 

It's really easy to do too. Here's the simple steps I take to add background...

 

Find a picture you like and upload it to your account information. Next, copy the link to it and paste the url into your cache description with a simple HTML code as follows

<body background="http://img.Groundspeak.com/user/46085_3500.gif">. [Where http://img.Groundspeak.com/user/46085_3500.gif would be your uploaded picture.]

 

Make sure you click the box for ''The descriptions below are in HTML''. Last, where ever you need a paragraph to end, add <p> and where you need a return, add <br>. It's that simple.

 

If you use a few more simple codes, you can change font colors, size, location. Add pictures, animation charators and everything else you see on various web sites. For more ideas, find a web site you like and view it's source code. You can do this at all web sites. Just be careful not to steal any copy rights.

 

With all this said, it would be interesting to have other cachers post example codes and/or caches that set a higher standard in Cache Page Design.

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<body background="http://img.Groundspeak.com/user/46085_3500.gif">. [Where http://img.Groundspeak.com/user/46085_3500.gif would be your uploaded picture.]

 

And, while I confess to even having one of my caches that does this, be prepared that doing so is guaranteed to result in illegal HTML.

 

The HTML specifications prohibit a <body> tag inside a body tag, which is where your cache page exists. Until the site allows you to edit the body tag that _it_ generates for the cache page, be prepared for a rash of problems with browsers not rendering it correctly, various PQ reader choking and so on.

 

I won't tell you not to do it; only that there are problems with it.

 

(Anybody that can get a page with nested body tags past http://validator.w3.org is welcome to argue with me. Others are prohibited on grounds this is a point made on technical correctness.)

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Here is a cache of mine that uses HTML. There are no fancy animations or backgrounds. Just a few links and a nice looking HTML table.

 

When I go to a cache page, all im looking for is the necessary information to find the cache. Anything more is just a distraction.

Edited by Wavehopper
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I broke a pile of w3.org specs on my cache. So far it's worked with PQs, browsers, and everything else. The fact that it doesn't meet w3.org standards says a lot more about w3.org's opinion of itself than it does about everyone else.

 

At worst, a body tag within a body tag shouldn't render (even though it does). So if all you're doing with it is changing the background and your page doesn't depend on the background change, then you shouldn't have any problems even if someone doesn't render it.

 

(By the way, don't bother trying to check your cache pages using w3.org's validator. None of them will pass. Even robertlipe's carefully crafted cache pages fail miserably. Oddly enough PQ's still work and browsers still render them.)

Edited by bons
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Just writing to add my disagreement with the characterization of amateur html as "improvements" to a cache page, or that "all of us appreciate" a cache page full of bad html. I am a paperless cacher who uses GPX files and other software programs almost exclusively for planning, mapping and reading about geocaches both at home and in the field. When I'm in the car and the next closest cache shows a big fat error message on my PDA, that's it... I will not hunt for that cache. Bad html has just cost the cache owner a "customer." Even worse, in certain cases it has caused other software to choke on the GPX file, so bad html is interfering with my ability to work with information for other caches properly formatted by their owners. This includes one of the 10 caches closest to my home.

 

It is rare for me to view a cache page online until I go there to log my visit. The cute graphics do nothing to enhance my geocaching experience, which is now over except for the log entry. Rather, on my slow dialup connection, the last insult delivered by "cute" cache pages are a bunch of slow-loading images and backgrounds to delay me.

 

If you look at my cache pages, there is no fancy stuff except for (1) an image and a link for my local geocaching group, provided to me by a web programmer who knows how to do that stuff properly, (2) an official logo on my caches in State Parks, signifying that they have permits, (3) simple hyperlinks to other websites that provide useful information about my cache, and (4) one cache with an image of Ferdinand Magellan burning in hell for all eternity.

 

Judging by the number of forum topics started by people wondering how to add images, backgrounds, etc. to their cache pages, there are at least as many html amateurs in the geocaching community as there are experienced web page creators. A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I for one am glad that some of the fancier bells and whistles have been restricted.

 

(Disclaimer: There are, of course, many examples of properly formatted cache pages with one or more special features added by the owner, which load quickly and which don't make my GPX files choke. I mean no offense to the owners who have properly set up their cache pages.)

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Could someone post a link to a cache that causes their web browser or gpx utility to "croak" and tell me what tool is actually dying on the render. I'd love to see how they're managing to do it sine the worst that should happen is that something shouldn't render. I'm amazed that any tool actually chokes and dies.

 

---------------

 

Personally, I'd rather people used HTML, made mistakes, and learned from then than remained ignorant all their lives. Part of learning is making mistakes. Part of growing is learning how to let other make them. HTML is a tool that allows your voice to be heard above the noise. Choosing to not learn it and make mistakes in the process because people get upset that you aren't a pro is simply allowing those people who already have that voice silence yours.

Edited by bons
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Warning: touchy subject detected

I broke a pile of w3.org specs on my cache.

Thank you for confessing for making life difficult for software developers everywhere. The next time I spend hours between 00 and 02 am coding around web page defects, I'll be sure to remember this discussion.

The fact that it doesn't meet w3.org standards says a lot more about w3.org's opinion of itself  than it does about everyone else.

I haven't analyzed the page in question, but that line of reasoning isn't a good one. w3.org has guys and gals that live, breathe, and sleep this stuff. It's easy (and sometimes fun) to make fun of standards committees but they really DO think about things like consistency, computational expense, rendering on a cell phone, and enablers for the visually impaired which are things the average HTML "hack" (and I'm not saying you are) that only cares that it works on Internet Exploder just can't fathom.

At worst, a body tag within a body tag shouldn't render (even though it does).
On whatever rendering engine you're using, that's probably true. But it isn't a guarantee. Standards are a contract between producers and consumers of data.
(By the way, don't bother trying to check your cache pages using w3.org's validator. None of them will pass. Even robertlipe's carefully crafted cache pages fail miserably. Oddly enough PQ's still work and browsers still render them.)

They fail miserably becuase the HTML hocked up by geocaching.com itself, frankly, pretty much flips the finger to standards conformance. If you create a cache page containing exactly zero text, it still won't validate because of defects in the output of the main web site. If you're going to go an a witch hunt to find illegal HTML with my name on it (and you can probably find some if you look hard enough) try pages that I actually DO control in their entirety. I'll even give you a starting point. I proudly display the "checked" logo on all the GPSBabel pages and I treat instances of non-conformance seriously.

 

I've personally contributed at least two changes to free/open web browsers (and submitted one patch to Plucker) inspired by common, but incorrect, geocaching.com output because of this very mindset - "it works on Internet Exploder patch level Thursday p.m., the rest of you can eat cake".

Could someone post a link to a cache that causes their web browser or gpx utility to "croak"

Well, here's one within the last week that resulted in a PQ cacher being unable to hunt the cache...It required admin intervention to correct incomplete tag nesting. Clearly invalid. Some tools choked on it.

Personally, I'd rather people used HTML, made mistakes, and learned from then than remained ignorant all their lives.

This is like advocating that we all speak colloquial English (after all, we can all understand it, right?) then getting ticked off at those that don't speak it as a native language. Being undertstood by some peers with common interests/tools and being correct are distinctly different states.

 

To be clear, I'm not saying that HTML in cache pages is inherently evil or that only highly trained professionals should do it any mor than I'm saying English should only be spoken by professional writers; I'm saying that not even pretending to care about standards conformance is a disservice to consumers of your page and the developers of the tools providing services to those consumers. I'm sorry, but I've coded around too many "you don't care how many closing tags there are since IE doesn't care" defects to be amused by civil disobedience.

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I've done my share as a programmer. I've done my share as a web designer. I've worked both sides of that fence now for a number of years and the truth is that as a programmer you have the ability to simply not render anything that doesn't parse or isn't recognized as a valid tag. If you're up in the middle of the night fixing that issue, you obviously failed to realize that html provided the the public is almost guaranteed to be malformed.

 

Requirement 1 as a programmer is deal with the fact that most HTML will not pass validation. Requirement 1 as a web designer is to realize that the standards are so weak that you need to test how ever rendering engine will treat your HTML because the browsers don't agree on what the standards mean. Eventually you realize that the standards are simply a common language we can use to talk about HTML with and that's about it.

 

If you want great HTML, visit alistapart.com, that's what they're about. If you want to go geocaching with freinds, come here. But don't expect the people here to care about HTML any more than you would expect the people at ala to care about Garmin. I can't see why the HTML for the cache pages should be held to a higher standard from the rest of the site, especially when the person typing it in is interested in geocaching, not web design.

 

As for the forum page you complained about, that looked like a problem with software not being able to handle expected input (aka garbage). Because honestly people are going to make mistakes, include typos, and otherwise mess up and software needs to deal with that fact.

 

ads.osdn.gif

 

(I love the HTML in that add. Look closely.)

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Here's a "sorta" related question:

 

What does the "user" parameter of the image in the code below correlate to?

http://img.Groundspeak.com/user/102455_600.gif

From the code can you determine the cacher? i.e., who is user 102455?

 

Edit - I wasn't very clear the first time, and I'm still pretty blurry

Edited by 9Key
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And, while I confess to even having one of my caches that does this, be prepared that doing so is guaranteed to result in illegal HTML.

 

The HTML specifications prohibit a <body> tag inside a body tag, which is where your cache page exists. Until the site allows you to edit the body tag that _it_ generates for the cache page, be prepared for a rash of problems with browsers not rendering it correctly, various PQ reader choking and so on.

 

I won't tell you not to do it; only that there are problems with it.

 

(Anybody that can get a page with nested body tags past http://validator.w3.org is welcome to argue with me. Others are prohibited on grounds this is a point made on technical correctness.)

That's kind of a bogus argument, since the pages are out of compliance to begin with. To start off with, cache pages have no doctype statement, so no validation checker is going to touch it.

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Just say "no". 

 

Dressing up pages with animations and color and backgrounds usually just makes them craptastic.  If you feel the need to go  all-out, do it on another web page and post a link to it on your cache page.

 

Is this one of those "craptastic" cache pages?

 

One of my cache pages!

 

I dared to use Mouse-Overs, Hot-Linking, Background and Foreground Images and much more. So, forgive me if I don't apologize for using lots of colors and images. It's just that I am a bit more imaginative and that plain text is outright boring!

 

Or perhaps this page is a better example of a "craptastic" personal web page?

 

My Webpage!

 

BTW, how much XML, HTML and XHTML do you understand and can you write in any of those formats?

Edited by Fledermaus
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Is this one of those "craptastic" cache pages?

 

One of my cache pages!

 

I dared to use Mouse-Overs, Hot-Linking, Background and Foreground Images and much more. So, forgive me if I don't apologize for using lots of colors and images. It's just that I am a bit more imaginative and that plain text is outright boring!

It certainly is. More than 13 different font/color/formatting combinations (not counting the heiroglyphics -- why not use the hint like every other cache?), a background that makes the footer information unreadable, four different background coloros, and worst of all, background music that made me close the page the first time, and turn off my speakers the second time. At least you managed to create a page without a goofy animated .gif images.

 

I don't see the mouseovers.

 

Or perhaps this page is a better example of a "craptastic" personal web page?

 

My Webpage!

 

Oh, wait. There it is.

 

I apologize in advance if you're offended, but back in the day, my friends and I used to call webpages that looked like this "technicolor vomit".

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In some cases, it's not a question of bad HTML.

 

In some cases it's a case of "stripes and checks don't mix."

 

Find colors that go together. Don't fight bad fonts with worse fonts. Yes, everyone notices the man in the day-glo tux. But that doesn't mean the day-glo looks good or has any style.

 

In the above page, the color use appears to be random. There's this wood background theme going that suddenly gets lost. And while white/black/red as a combination often works, red text on a black background on a white background is literally painful to read.

 

Actually most of it was painful to read. Oddly enough, the wingdings text at the end was the easiest to read because I just looked at the HTML. What the point of that was, I have no idea.

 

Dressing up your pages is more like adding small subtle accessories to an outfit. Nice little touches that make it all flow a little better. Wearing a tin foil hat and blinking buttons is not "dressing up".

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At least you managed to create a page without a goofy animated .gif images.

:lol: I'll have to correct that slight oversite. I'll add several of them as soon as I find something that's really irratating to the eyes.

 

:lol: Did anyone happen to notice that Howe Farm has a lot of caches in one area and that my cache page crosslinks them? Each image has a function, such as a to inform the viewer of a clue.

 

:) The "heiroglyphics" as you call them, they are used as encoded information about the cache. Try using Notepad and the COPY/PASTE functions.

 

:D As for the brightly colored intro for my personal webpage, that was an experiment that will be attended to in the near future. It's actually a rainbow divider-bar turned sideways, using an image editior, and then repeated horizontally.

 

:lol: I never have been one of those so-called "lemmings that supposedly jump off clifs blindly when told. However, I do plan on making improvements to several other pages as time goes on, to include colorful displays and the like. Life is so boring in B&W.

 

B) I've never heard of "technovomit" but I do like "Techo-Rock"!. Right now I'm thinking of "The Exorcist". That term sounds like something from the "Web pages that suck" book or website.

 

:lol: The only complaints that I've received so far are from those here in the forum. I wonder why that is? Of course, there is always the possibility that cachers won't hunt my caches because they're so colorful. Nah, that won't happen! There's too many "Point Collectors" out there.

Edited by Fledermaus
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i have absolutely no leg to stand on here from a technical point of view.

 

i hate cache pages with cute backgrounds, and i prefer plain fonts. i like my text black on white.

 

i have seen exactly ONE cache page that i thought was enhanced by the background; a night only cache where the owner changed the background to black with a few stars.

 

cute tricks take longer to load and besides, i'm allergic to cute. this is a cute-free zone.

 

just for reference, i will also tell you that i do not use emoticons. i do not send greeting cards.

 

i like the simple, plain gc.com background. makes me feel comfortable and at home. when i switch from window to window, i don't have to guess if it's a cache page. i don't even have to look close.

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i'm not even going to look. and if i lived near you, i'd learn real quick to get your caches in PQ's.

 

whew.

 

and i just reread the starter post for this thread "we all appreciate it"... that makes me giggle. "we" apreciate it when people don't add anything. "we" prefer a plain page.

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WOW! Bill, thank you! I just added my first background....(I'd put the link here to show you, but I don't know how to do that either!) But it looks cool. I'm going to have fun now! Do you know how to add a small picture on the page as well? I add photos already, but you have to click on the link to view them. Can I have a photo actually in the description area?

 

Again...THANKS!!!!! :o

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One reason to not go overboard on backgrounds and sounds is that you aren't guaranteed that someone is using a PC to view your beautiful cache description. There are those folks who use Plucker or iSilo in conjunction with GPX Spinner to put their data on a Palm or PocketPC. On a B/W Palm, BG images make reading cache pages very difficult. The person viewing your page could also be using a 3G cell phone or a PDA with a GPRS connection. These things behave differently from a regular browser.

 

If you have the skills to make your cache page dressy, do so. When you are done, at least go to the trouble to make sure it looks alright on a browser other than MSIE on Windows. There are Mac people, Linux people, Mozilla people, Opera people, and people who use PDAs all right here. I'm sure some of them wouldn't mind clicking on your cache page to see if it looks alright.

 

For those of you who might need it, I hacked up a version of Plucker to remove BG images for use on my Palm. If anyone is interested, I documented my changes here.

 

-E

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Although I understand the point being made and I generally think we need standards, the fact is that very, very few people design pages that fully conform to the W3C specifications. Just for fun, I ran www.geocaching.com www.amazon.com and www.google.com through the validator and it rejected all three. The first two were rejected for failing to provide proper character encoding in the HTTP Content-Type and the third for no DOCTYPE. Putting out HTML that only renders in IE is one thing, but I don't think it is reasonable to assert that people who don't follow the full spec are to blame for your midnight coding problems. I can't find a browser that blows up on embedded body tags. I only found on that doesn't render the body tag "properly."

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Interesting that you should make comments regarding DOCTYPE and other than IE browser compatibility.

 

When I created My Webpage I felt that it was absolutely necessary to include the complete "Header" wherever possible, not to mention it's XHTML compatibility.

 

I do have a question for those in the know. Why is the HTML command bgproperties="fixed" not allowed by XHTML?

 

My editor, TIDY doesn't like that, but I use it anyway!

Edited by Fledermaus
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I do have a question for those in the know. Why is the HTML command bgproperties="fixed" not allowed by XHTML?

bgproperties is an IE only tag. The current reccomendation is to use the following CSS instead if you want compliant pages:

 

body {background-image: url(../images/tile.gif); background-attachment: fixed; }

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Just to add to your frustration. Here are my new animated backgrounds for my caches.

 

The Plague of Vague

 

Paintball Cache -- Warning. This one is annoying.

 

Cache from the Black Lagoon

 

Enjoy! :lol:

I like the "The Plague of Vague" background.

 

The "Paintball Cache" hurts, ouch!

 

The "Cache from the Black Lagoon" just ugly (I think that's the point though).

 

My Cache pages have backgrounds, that many don't like, but I try to keep the part you have to look at, straightforward.

 

Lot's of font colors and typefaces, for no reason, just don't do it for me.

 

I hate background music, and animated gifs, and will switch to the printer friendly version if there's too much crap on a page.

 

I've heard there are problems with backgrounds for people who download cache pages to a PDA? can the switch to downloading the printer friendly page somehow?

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Depending on the browser he's surfing with and it's settings gif animation may be turned off.

 

Despite popular opinion, HTML does NOT control the viewer's computer. The browser chooses what to render and how to render it. In this case it sounds like animated images are turned off.

Edited by bons
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