Why did no one tell me that the layout of comments form was seriously messed up?
Oh well, I’ll fix it over the weekend.
Update – Fixed, in so much that nothing overlaps anymore. A poke in the HTML reveals what an un-semantic mess my template has become as it’s been tweaked and twisted over the years. Time for a clean start perhaps.
“At this time, support for is available only when running on Windows with the latest Firefox browser or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater.”
I find it quite hard to believe that the service will work okay in IE 5.0 (released in 1999!) but not in nine years newer browsers like Opera 9.5 and Safari 3.
Has it been tested at all in Opera?
Depending on the response I get I may reveal which site the original message came from.
I came across a nice juicy bug in Internet Explorer today. New to me, but not to everyone else.
The short version is, if you change the useMap property of an img node then when the new map has fewer area nodes than the old one, IE will crash.
The good news is that it seems to be fixed in IE 8 beta 2. So we can stop worrying about this bug in ten years or so time…
I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and started updating the theme (it was so old it pre-dated widgets and so kludged together that it has three different ways of producing the same rendering). Things may be a little rough around the edges for a while.
I’ve also defined the first post on the homepage (actually, come to think of it, on any page) as an IE8-ready Web Slice – I’m not sure that this is really a good idea and I have some misgivings about Web Slices in general.
Consider the following code:
<form action="whatever" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="foo" value="a very long string" />
<input type="checkbox" name="confirm" />
<input type="submit" />
</form>In Internet Explorer (confirmed in both 6 and 7) submitting this form with the checkbox ticked results in no response from the server. (Submitting it without the checkbox ticked just brings you back to where you started.) No problem at all in Gecko-spawn or Opera.
Anyone seen anything like that before? And better still, got a solution?
irritatedI upgraded to Word Press 2.1 earlier in the week and it went fairly smoothly.
As is now customary I had to hack a few files because there is still no standard way of making the category and archive counts appear inside the links rather than after them. I also had to comment out a section of the new categories list function as I couldn’t get it to not include the default header to the list in addition to the header I was supplying.
And I’ve just realised that if I comment out the code that inserts a <ul> I should also find and comment out the code that inserts </ul> ‘cos right now all my pages are invalid.
I’ve also hacked the Now Reading plugin to link to LibraryThing rather than an internal library page. It makes more sense to only tag, rate and (sometimes) review books in one place rather than two. If only LT provided a feed based on its date started and date read fields I could probably do away with Now Reading altogether. I also haceked together a link to the book edit page directly from each sidebar entry. I hope you can’t see that. 
And I’ve just seen that this too is producing invalid XHTML. Sigh.
The Live+Press plugin controls has vanished from the write post page but everything important is still working behind the scenes. I just can’t set my Live Journal userpic, or the mood and music fields, any more. Quick test: is it still parsing lj tags like this one: ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
very_true_thing ?
[Update] – Odd. The Live+Press options are present in the edit page, and whether a post gets cross posted or not seems to depend on whether I save a draft first or not. Curious.
On the bright side, I seem to be unaffacted by the PHP 5 fiasco that hit my host. And I’ve finally got around to enabling friendly permalinks, though I wonder whether http://www.stevepugh.net/VTT/2007/01/13/i-♥-the-taxman/ will work in older browsers.
curiousJust noticed that the page zoom feature in Internet Explorer 7 zooms all background images, except for those set on the body element. Peculiar.
So Jack’s asked me what I think of version seven of the “that damned browser” (aka the “browser-like operating system component”). Well, I’ve been using the betas for quite a while and really I don’t really see a lot to get very excited about.
The interface is strange, with all the useful stiff tucked away on the bottom right hand side of the toolbars (and I understand that the next release of Office will have a similar layout) and several obscure buttons way down there on the status bar.
Tabbed browsing. Great if you’re wedded to IE, but last year’s news (well year before last, or was it the year before that?) for everyone else. Thumbnail view of tabs is nice but not as nice as Opera’s tooltip thumbnails.
RSS reader is nice. Much better than Firefox’s dire live bookmarks feature and nicer to look at than Opera’s reader.
Security features. Obviously needed, not my area of expertise, nothing much to say.
CSS improvements? Yep, at last we have max-width support and so on. But really just playing catch up with the competition. Not seen anything in the way of new bugs or incompatabilities that’s going to cause problems for my sites but time will tell.
Page zoom. Copied from Opera and not quite as well done. Very good to see both page and text zoom available. Shame that text zoom is still as crippled as it was in IE 6. And no minimum font size setting – probably the single best invention since the back button, a very simple setting that solves so many problems.
Search settings, nice, better than IE 6, not as good as Opera.
Which, just about sums it up. A huge improvement on IE 6 but not as good as Opera or even Firefox.
relaxedYou all know which one.
At work until nine o’clock this evening. Doing something the hard way because the easy way would utilise a semi-transparent PNG and for various reasons the usual hacks to get them to (sort of) work in IE couldn’t be made to work. Gah.
So came home, ate fish and chips and watched the first two episodes of The Hand of Fear. Feeling a little better now. Shame that it’s now a bit late to start drinking beer.
frustratedJust started up Opera and look what popped up.
With a major version number jumping by that much I expect it to be able to do the laundry, record TV shows that haven’t been broadcast yet and connect to the Reticulan Internet over sub-ether carrier wave.
Meanwhile, Opera 9.01 change log.
[Update] – Tim Altman from Opera said this in a newsgroup post:
Yeah…. So, unfortunately, Opera’s version comparison algorithm thinks that .00 is greater than .01, so we had to trick Opera by changing the major version number, not just the minor version number. “90.1″ was the closest to “9.01″ and we’re not likely to see that version while we’re still using the current update system. We’ll most likely have to do the same thing for the entire 9.x series.
Huh?
cheerful