In Dreamweaver, many pages that looked fine before are coming up unformatted now. Anyone know why?

Question

I am helping someone maintain their website. I started with a working website which had been last modified using Adobe Dreamweaver. Initially, I got most of the site imported to my copy of Dreamweaver on my system (there were a few pages that didn't look correct). I have been working on the site for a couple of months now, and suddenly all of the pages are displaying in Dreamweaver unformatted.

I went up to the website server and downloaded the current pages (which are working properly) to my system. When I open these pages in Dreamweaver, they show up unformatted as well.

Can someone help me?

Answer 1

I assume the pages use CSS for most of the formatting. Did you download the CSS files too? If not, downloading the CSS files and placing them in the correct folder should solve your problem.
If you have the CSS files and still same problem, are the pages using PHP to call the CSS: Something like

If that's the case, the pages may not be display as correctly formatted in Dreamweaver, but will display correctly when loaded to a web server and accessed via a browser. (As long as the path specified for the cssfile is correct). Hope this helps you.

Answer 2

Many possible reasons...
First, check your website with IE6, IE7, Firefox, Opera and Netscape.
You may find that they are correct is some of them.
If they are correct in some, but not in others, your CODE needs to be adapted to the web evolution.
IE7 is a real pain, and all tables and fonts have been recently changed, showing perfectly good websites in a new scramble.
Dreamweaver is your next problem: they are always BEHIND the web evolution and do not keep up with the changes.
Suggestion: drop DW in your bin, and read/edit the code with a simple notepad. You'll be surprised how the code is unreadable!
For the rest, you have to install a "user client application" detector, to detect WHAT is the browser in use and, using that information, make a series of "if (IE) then .. elseif (Opera) then .. elseif (netscape) then ...
The incompetence of browsers to reach a STANDARD specification make the coders' life impossible.
I stick with the four I named above, and none other...
Sorry for the bad news...

Answer 3

Try opening it on another browser because there is certain browser show the program unorganized