As I was testing a recent site I had designed in Internet Explorer for compatibility, I came across one of the forms which was apparently causing Internet Explorer 7 to crash. It put a real damper on the testing since it was causing a crash which I would consider to be pretty heavy on the “must fix” list before it goes live. The worst part was, I had done a lot of extensive testing with Firefox which showed no problems, and even Internet Explorer 8 was behaving as expected. Thankfully I have Internet Explorer 8 which finally has a decent set of developer tools built in, so I set forth to try and figure out what the problem was… hopefully!
My first thought was that it might be some code I had recently added to a JavaScript file which was responsible for capturing the name/value pair of the submit button pressed when you submit a form (which is the only way to get that information when using AJAX to submit form data). The code worked great in Firefox, but I hadn’t tested it yet for Internet Explorer at all, so I changed it around a bit to see if maybe some of that was causing it. My debugging progressed to completely commenting out that new code, essentially bringing me back to code I knew worked in Internet Explorer 7 before, but it was still crashing!
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If you do any sort of Web Development at all and you don’t know about either of these sites, you’re severely missing out on one of the Internets most useful resources ever created for Web Development. Sure, there are other sites, even Microsoft’s MSDN Library which has pretty good documentation on a lot of the same stuff, but none are as easy to navigate and have as many tips and information about cross-browser application.
I’m talking of course about Brian Wilson’s Index DOT Html and Index DOT Css sites. I have been using these sites over the past 8+ or so years as one of my primary resources when it comes to Web Development. They document the majority of the HTML and CSS elements and properties, how they work and what browsers support them (and to what degree) – complete with browser specific tips and notes.
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In the middle of developing a web application and doing some routine testing just to make sure my AJAX code was working, I stumbled upon a rather odd and what seemed to be rather random error in Firefox 3. It took some debugging and a bit of speculation to figure out what the problem most likely was and how I hoped I fixed it.
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If you’re any sort of respectable web designer, you’ve obviously come across many situations when you’ve had to use divs as a sort of inline block and only wished that you could use display: inline-block to quite simply solve all your layout problems. Instead though, we’ve had to resort to using float: left and then inserting a float clearing div/br after all those floated divs. Sure, it works but it’s not what we really want to end up doing (especially having to throw in extra html markup just for visual correctness).
Well, I’ve since run in to a situation that using float: left wasn’t working for me (try centering a set of divs that have float: left – it’s a pain!), so I had to find some kind of way to use inline-block. Thankfully, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3 support inline-block now, but we still have to deal with those hard-headed users that take forever (or never) to upgrade their browsers. To accomodate Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 we have to use some CSS hacks (what else is new!); thankfully they’re not that bad (but it still invalidates your CSS… bummer).
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