Your HTML
The simplest HTML is provided ready for use in search.htm. It is advisable that you use this until your back-end works fine.
Once you decide to add bells and whistles to your search, you have two options. One is to keep the simple design of search.htm, but make it part of a frame set. This way you can add elements such as menus etc in a frame and keep the output of search.htm in another.
The other option is to incorporate your entire design in search.htm. If you fully understand the "blocks" system described above, this should not be too difficult. The one most important factor is to keep track of elements that need to be opened in one block and closed in another.
For example, you might want a page in tables that looks like this:
If you are planning to put your results in the main table, you can put all the HTML code in the <!--top--> block of search.htm, up to and including the opening of the main table (<table><tr><td>). If you then put the closing of the main table and the closing tags of the page in the <!--bottom--> block (</table></tr></td></body></html>) and leave all other blocks unformatted, you will have the design of your choice and all your results in the right place.
In a more complicated design, where you want to format results individually, you can apply the same method as long as you keep track of the opening and closing of HTML elements. You must either open and close them in the same block, or make sure that any possible combination of blocks will result in properly opened and closed HTML tags.
What you cannot do without editing the source code, is change the order in which the blocks are parsed. Taking the above example, let's assume that you want your page to look like this:
To get this, you need to have everything except the results and navigation in the <!--top--> block, since that is the only block that can draw the page even if there are no results at all. In this case your search.htm would look like this:
<!--variables-->
[your configuration]
<!--/variables-->
<!--top-->
<html>
<body>
<table>
<tr colspan="2">
<td>[logo, banner ads]</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>[search form]</td>
<td>
<!--/top-->
[all other blocks in search.htm except "bottom"]
<!--bottom-->
[closing elements like the mnogosearch link
and a link to the webmaster]
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
<!--/bottom-->
The individual blocks can be formatted individually as long as that formatting is closed within each block. Thus, nothing stops you from doing things like
<!--error-->
<table>
<tr><td bgcolor"red">
<font color="#ffffff">
[error variables]
</font>
</tr><td>
</table>
<!--error-->
as long as such formatting is opened and closed properly within the same block.
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