GoLive "stl:xxx" tags causing spacing woes

January 9, 2007 11:22 AM

Anyone know anything at all about Adobe GoLive's use of -type HTML tags? Its insertion of these tags around dates, places, etc is causing extra spaces to pop up, throwing off proper punctuation and basically just making copytext look bad.

Apologies if the formatting is still borked, it's very difficult to get something like this working well with the way HTML is handled here :(

The marketing person at my job uses GoLive to edit some aspects of our company webpage (blech) and it seems to add in these odd tags around various things such as dates and place names.

They are not used in any formatting fashion that I can see (certainly such a setup is not used on these particular pages, as the text in question is not being styled any differently) but because they're put in with a bunch of newlines, it causes extra spaces to show up.

So for example, we'd have something like this:

    Blah blah blah New York, NY, blah blah.

The HTML in GoLive then looks like this:

    Blah blah blah
    <stl:City>
        New York
    </stl:City>
    ,
    <stl:Place>
        NY
    </stl:Place>
    , blah blah.

All those extra newlines between "New York" and the comma turn into a space, so it looks like:

Blah blah blah, New York , NY, blah blah.

Anyway, Google is turning up exactly zero about anything called "STL" (except for C++'s Standard Template Language, and St Louis -- removing those from the search do not turn up anything useful) and GoLove's own documentation and support forums are bare on the subject.

I've searched through as many of the preferences and features that I can find (never used the app myself, I do all my HTML/CSS in text editors) and nothing seems to deal with these tags.

Help?

posted by cyrusdogstar to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Response by poster: Turns out the tags are "st1" with a one and not a lowercase "L" (tipped off by someone else who suggested the idea) which brings up that it's related to Office/Word's SmartTags feature. Unfortunately this doesn't help much as Googling and searching the help, etc still results in no ideas for getting rid of them. Ugh.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 1:04 PM on January 9, 2007

Honestly, I've never seen this in GoLive. But I keep things pretty simple in there.
You might want to take your question over to the Adobe User Forums, and see what they have to say. I suspect it will have something to do with xml.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:57 PM on January 9, 2007

I don't think those are Microsoft Smart Tags, which are an evil and long-abandoned technology. I think they're a feature of Adobe's integration of Photoshop/Illustrator and GoLive.

This document says:

"Many designers will begin their work in Photoshop, ImageReady or Illustrator, carve up the static composition using slices, and then use the methods presented in parts 1 and 2 of this tutorial to create their Web pages. The problem is, when they go back and make changes to the design in the original composition, they then have to manually update the files in GoLive, which often leads to confusion and, in rare cases, tragedy when
pieces get mixed up or lost.

GoLive comes to our rescue with Smart Tags. When placed into a Web page, these will automatically monitor Illustrator or Photoshop documents and update the Web page when changes are made to the source file. This is spectacularly helpful if you prefer making your changes to the original image, rather than trying to mess about with HTML.

So that doesn't help, but as you say, they shouldn't be appearing in the final output, surely? They could only be able to "monitor the original document" when you're working in GoLive, not via some magical new technology which integrates with Photoshop files over the web.

Somewhere in the output settings or working practices of your GoLive user there's something missing.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:44 PM on January 9, 2007

Response by poster: Yea, I've basically given up. I've asked the marketing person in question to check with the person we apparently contract with for the website (who creates the initial pages, although we update them later on with GoLive + FTP, and these tags appear even in text added by us) and otherwise, since they're planning on going with a new, more all-encompassing contract with a more full-featured solution, I'm dropping it for now.

Thanks for the replies!
posted by cyrusdogstar at 4:17 PM on January 9, 2007