This is just part 1 of what I figure will be a many many part series.
Ok right now it’s late and I just managed to fix a problem with IE and it took me hours to find the simplest problem so this will be a lot of bitching, moaning, and general sleep deprived randomness.
Here’s the deal, I recently redid my page, making it much more manageable and in some respects making it much easier on the eyes, is it perfect? No, but is it better than some I would like to think so.
Previously I had turned some long unordered lists into basically a mini javascript app. I have a bunch of info on various topics stored in some arrays and have programmed in methods to display those arrays, pretty simple. The code was written for a drop down box but I had taken care before to write the code so that it easily could be tweaked to work with text links instead.
So, I tweak the code to display text links, the links display, but the arrays the links are supposed to lead you to won’t display, well correction they won’t display in IE. Firefox has no problems, Opera has no problems, and even Safari for Windows has no problems. Still however IE is the problem child. I try to use it’s built in error console but to no avail as it sends me on a while goose chase.
Fast forward a couple hours right as I am about to head to bed, I remember I have a few for loops and many a time I have had some strange bug occur when I attempt to have 2 for loops with the same variable name, even if they are local variables and they are out of scope. Turns out that’s not the problem.
So right as I am going to head to bed a few minutes ago, I decide to check one last time, and I discover the problem that IE had but no one else does. I use an h1 tag to present a subset of the array data, and to allow manipulation of that heading tag I gave it the identifier “title”, turns out IE didn’t like that and would abort when the programmer designed their javascript this way.
I wouldn’t mind this if the problem was universal, since all browsers use the same javascript environment, but no IE has to always do something that no one else does. Countless times this occurs, it even occurs in my new wordpress theme I am just finishing up, just for IE I have to use an unnecessary center tag just to center the content since apparently IE sometimes has probs with margin: auto.
I hate to be one of those people who is constantly hating on microsoft since I do like a lot of what they do, but their browser is ripe with these bugs. Here’s to hoping firefox, opera and safari make some significant gains, we need another big browser out there to force microsoft to stop being lazy. We also need to get the web user to “rediscover the web” and start using a newer browser, any of the ones I mentioned are simply put more fun than IE.