Today, I fixed a bug in my blog which has perplexed me for, literally, years...
The bug affected how the blog displayed in IE vs. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.
In IE, the "Read the rest of the entry" expandable section function worked properly.
In the other browsers, rather than displaying the above as a link which "expanded" the rest of the entry in-place, I had a "Posted by <author> at <date>" where the <author> had a mailto: link and the <date> had a link to the full entry.
This, by the way, is the default for the Movable Type default entry template.
I had always assumed that Netscape et.al. did not display correctly due to a difference in the way they handled the javascript and HTML.
Turns out, it was a bug in my code!
I always endeavor to comment my code well. I also typically retain old HTML - just in case - and deactivate it by bracketing the old code with the HTML begin <!-- and end --> comment markers
I also use this format to identify functional sections, for example:
<!-- Start section which does whatever -->
Code which does whatever
<!-- End section which does whatever -->
<!-- Start section which does something else -->
Code which does something else
<!-- End section which does something else -->
Unfortunately, it turns out that I neglected the --> for one of my start section comments. Since I had a "start" immediately following and "end" comment, I guess IE just saw the two as one long comment, but Netscape et. al. acted very differently.
Amazing how adding three characters can have such a profound impact.
Guess that's why I didn't make it long term as a programmer.
PS. This entry was written in SharpMT. It only seemed fitting given this all revolved around Extended Entries, and WLW doesn't support them (yet).
While I am talking about SharpMT, I should also mention one negative I've found with WLW - the HTML it generates for each entry is quite bloated compared to that which is generated by SharpMT. Guess it is analogous to the difference between a file generated by a text editor and a word processor.
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Posted by David at November 30, 2006 02:03 PM