Allan Rousselle's House of Cards: How to Destroy an Afternoon

March 24, 2002

How to Destroy an Afternoon

This morning, I decided to spend a little time trying to fix an interesting bug in the way IE renders this site. The problem had to do with how certain CSS elements (the "float" property, to be precise) are rendered. Netscape 4.7 appeared to be doing okay with this particular issue.

Didn't take long to fix the appearance in IE. I simply put the left and right hand columns back into tables and -- voila -- it worked beautifully. Except, all of a sudden Nescape refused to display the right hand column altogether. Near as I can tell, Netscape 4.7 throws a fit as soon as you start including "div" tags within tables. I played around some more and tried to fix the problem.

Six hours later, and my day is --pfft-- gone. And, what do I have to show for it? Ultimately, I had to revert the site back to its original appearance, which means the rendering problem in IE is back. (In IE, if you have the window set kinda narrow, the right hand column gets bumped down to the bottom of the page. Yuck.) So, in short, I know a lot more about what doesn't work in IE and Netscape, but that's about all I have to show for the day.

Blech.

PS: How many of you use Netscape 4.7? Netscape 6.0? IE for Mac? IE for Windows? Please click on the comments button below and let me know. Thanks!

Posted by on March 24, 2002 05:37 PM in the following Department(s):

Comments

(a) I'm using IE6.0

(b) this version of IE does NOT bump the right-hand column to the bottom during a shrinkie-dinkie

(c) this f***ing comment form won't resize, and it's driving me up a border!(ahhhh....that feels better. haven't had a good swear all day! thanks.)

(d) after hitting 'preview' I see errors at the bottom of this comment form, to wit: "ambiguous use of Spam." I beg to differ: when I use Spam, I know exactly how I'm using it. I don't know what's *in* it, of course, but I'm always quite sure that I'm frying it with eggs. Or (in HI) rolling it in sticky rice and Nori.

(e) NOW aren't you sorry you let us post comments to your website?

Posted by: Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon on March 24, 2002 8:53 PM

Hiddie ho!

1)As for the going to the bottom shrinkie dinkie thing, it does not do it on IE 6.0 on Windows XP.

2)And the hovers do work.

3)I too would like this comment thing to a)resize or b) be full screen. It's somewhat claustrophobic the way it is now.

4)Looks fine in Netscape 4.0 (which for some reason is on my desktop still.

5)At the bottom of this comment page as well as the preview page, I see :

MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x140022ba8) Ambiguous use of {spam_protect} resolved to {"spam_protect"} at lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 518.
MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x140022ba8) Ambiguous use of {spam_protect} resolved to {"spam_protect"} at lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 536.
MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x140022ba8) Ambiguous use of {spam_protect} resolved to {"spam_protect"} at lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 734.
MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x140022ba8) Ambiguous use of {spam_protect} resolved to {"spam_protect"} at lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 745.

6)I shall check at work tomorrow (I have the day off today) and see what I have there. I think I have an older version of IE there as well as Netscape 4.7.

Me.

Posted by: Samantha Ling on March 25, 2002 3:34 PM

Oh, and let me not forget, you're one of the very few people who still don't have a notify list. Are you going to do that? I'm always disappointed when wandering over here to see that you haven't updated. At least with a notify, I'll know when to wander over here. :p~~~

BTW, we played with this one deck of Warner Bros cards (which we play during our lunch break) so much that they got all sticky and nasty. We are now playing with my Sailor Moon Deck. The boys are going to love that!

Posted by: Samantha Ling on March 25, 2002 3:38 PM

Thanks for the great feedback. I'll work on the resizable forms and the notify list within the next couple of weeks.

Posted by: Allan on March 27, 2002 9:30 PM

I too see the error messages at the bottom of the Comments entry window. I'm using Netscape 4.73 on Win2K and the page looks fabulously swell. I don't read your blog from home, where I use Netscape 4.73 on MacOS 9.2.2. But then I'm a heathen.

Beeeej

Posted by: Jeffrey "Beeeej" Anbinder on March 29, 2002 8:35 PM