Page source in HTML5 showing strange content

[Sarianna]

Hello all,

I'm fairly new to Flare, so I've created HTML5 output for my documentation the easy way, based on MadCap's example template. The web pages look fine, but when I click "View page source", I get a long litany of code with lorem ipsum filler text, items named "Click a star to rate this topic", and content apparently related to creating usernames and passwords. The actual page content is not included at all in this "page source" (whereas "View frame source" correctly gives the topic frame content). Saved and reopened as a separate HTML page, the code yields this:

screenshot.1.jpg

None of this is included in my documentation, so I assume it must be somehow coming from the MadCap template or the build process. I've tried searching through the master page, target, and website skin options of my project, but I can't figure out where this stuff is coming from and how to get rid of it. Any helpful hints?

Thanks in advance,
Sarianna

[Lydia]

Hi Sarianna,
can you specify where you get the "MadCap's example template" from and how this was applied?
Thanks, Lydia.

[Sarianna]

Hi Lydia,

it's the basic Web Print Mobile template from the New Project Wizard, Flare version 9.1.2. Actually, I now tried to create a test project from that same template, and it exhibits the same behavior. This time I made absolutely no changes to Flare's default settings or content, just created the new project based on the template and clicked Build Website Output, and the result is the same. Perhaps you and other Flare users could try it out and see if you get the same thing, or is the problem just with my copy of Flare?

I put the .htm file resulting from "View page source" into Dropbox, in case anybody's interested in checking it out.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/teexvhi9ij0x1vt/LBDI-dLECY

This is not such a big issue, since the website of my project seems to work fine, and this weirdness is only visible in the page source. But I would still like to get rid of it, just in case our customers also decide to view the source and start wondering about it.

Thanks,
Sarianna

[Lydia]

Hi Sarianna,
thank you for clarifying. The skin that comes with the template has set the Community feature on (see the General tab of the skin, Features like TOC, Index, etc.). I think that accounts for the rating and username/password stuff. I'm not sure where the rest originates from. Could you try to uncheck the Community feature to see whether that helps?
Regards, Lydia.

[Sarianna]

Thanks for the tip, Lydia, but unfortunately that didn't help either. I unchecked all the Community-related features in the skin, but the build result is still the same. I'll have to keep investigating...

[Lydia]

Sarianna, I checked out your test file and compared it to a default.htm (HTML5 output) of my own projects. While I haven't compared it bit by bit, it looks very much the same. Honestly, I did not check into that level before. The default.htm is created by Flare when building the HTML5 output. It seems to contain lots of 'optional' stuff. If you want to be sure what it all does and whether it is necessary to worry about it, you'd have to ask MadCap support. However, it seems to me that this is part of the game.

[Sarianna]

Yep, I was just coming back to report that I tried a couple of other test projects, one with an Empty template and another imported from a Word file, and they also have the same page source. So it seems to be coming from the HTML5 build process itself regardless of template or skin. But if you, and thus probably also other Flare users, also get the same result, and nobody has yet noticed it messing up their projects or websites (or resulting in complaints from customers ), I guess it's OK to just let it be. I was afraid this might be a problem with my particular setup, but that seems not to be the case. Thanks for your help, Lydia!