"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
8 September 2006Bring on the nanoswattersProgramming is an unusual art form: it fights back. Part of the collateral damage is the bug. (If your immediate response is "That's actually a feature," you've been doing this too long.) And the smaller it is, the harder it is to get a grip on. Terry found this anomaly in Firefox:
I was generating a monthly archive list from a database.... Simple, straight-forward. Until I added May. It viewed over the top of April. June did the same. July viewed normally, as did the rest of the months of the year. This only happened in Firefox. IE and Opera were fine. To make it weirder, it straightened right out if I made the date May 2006. Apparently only strings of 4 characters or less were affected. Bizarre.
So I went back over everything I’d written. I stripped every div out of the file and reduced it to that one element, an unordered list. A piece at a time, I disassembled the li definition until only 2 things remained — text-indent:-2em; It didn’t matter which of those 2 lines I took out — removing either one fixed it. But combined, it blew up. CSS is not my strong point, as should be obvious, but I'm wondering if maybe those two parameters overlap slightly: bolding the text changes its size, after all. Still, two em is a fair amount of real estate on screen, and it's not like she was using Double Secret Ultra Bold or anything.
What a wonderful use of 4 hours. Now I have to decide if it’s worth the hassle to file a report on it.
Just email them a copy of the article and let them figure it out. Posted at 9:42 AM to PEBKAC |