Phil Oye

Debugging is never done

Crap. Somewhere along the line I broke the stylesheet for this site in IE6 for Windows. Damn. I’ll get to it soon. Update: We should be all good. The stylesheet code for this site is a mess. I definitely learned a lot doing the Bryant Park site. I’ll have to get around to tightening it up a bit.

Debugging is hell

After launching the Bryant Park site, we stumbled upon two curious bugs.

First, the site completely exploded on the Mac. All browsers. Only about half the styles were applied correctly—layout was all over the place. But, it worked like a champ on the Windows side. IE/Mozilla, take your pick. After a bit of exploration, I noticed that the every class declaration in the stylesheet had a extra period. It would look like this:

..selected { color: #9c3; }

…instead of:

.selected { color: #9c3; }

Subtle right? The question was, how did they get there? Anyway, I re-send the stylesheet to Bryant Park, thinking that someone got a little carried away with search and replace or something. But the client gets the file and there are still double periods! Apparently, sending a CSS file though my webmail adds periods to every line that begins with a period. Someone will have to explain that one to me. But all is well. I zipped up the file and resent. Perfect.

That got me through another six hours before we notice that the site wouldn’t render in IE5/Mac. Nothing. It would hang forever before giving an error message. But only in IE/Mac. It worked in Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Camino, Netscape 6, Netscape 7, IE5/Win, and IE6/Win.

What was so vexing was that it was only on the live site. IE5/Mac worked fine when pointing to Moment’s testing server. Same code, but it worked. It worked locally on my development PowerBook using Apache. Same code. Huh???

Ah, but then the light bulb went off. I noticed that it was slower on IE than any other browser. After a few minutes of flailing around I figured it out. I was referencing an empty CSS file using the method to hide styles from Netscape 4 and to prevent the dreaded FOUC bug. Anyway, adding a comment to the file solved the problem. Now it is just as speedy as ever. Or it will be once the files are updated on the live server, which should happen by tomorrow morning.

I actually had a lot of fun coding this site. XHTML, CSS for layout, and picking up PHP for the first time was great. However, debugging code was why I stopped taking computer science classes at Carnegie Mellon. Maybe I should just stick to information architecture.

IHT.com

Here’s an interesting interview with John Weir. He’s the crazy-mad-CSS genius behind the design and development of IHT.com.

What I found most interesting was that he basically said he’d meet IHT’s (very small) budget if they let him do what he wanted on the design. An interesting approach (this was the bubble after all), but pretty damn successful if you ask me. IHT gets a great site, though it sounds like they weren’t huge fans, and the designers gets to create a great portfolio piece.

Judging from the comments at the bottom of the article, some people don’t agree. To whom I say, what business is it of yours? You’re not the client. If IHT wanted to hire someone else, design a Web site with different goals, or pay more (and get more control), they they could’ve. Just because you’re a user, I’m not sure you have any rights in the matter. Boycott IHT if you’d like, but the designer deserves no blame.

Anyway, isn’t this basically what every designer does?

Progressive Enhancement

Inclusive Web Design for the Future, Steven Champeon and Nick Finck, is a good presentation on Web development using “progressive enhancement.” Meaning, start with the core content which will work everywhere, then add the cool stuff for modern browsers, rather than the other way around.

ESPN has seen the light

A great interview with Mike Davidson, an associate art director at ESPN.com (warning, that link crashes Safari Beta v60), that talks about the motives behind adopting a standards compliant, table-less layout on their front page.

I would argue that ESPN going with standards is more influential than Wired, because the latter’s audience was primarily comprised of people that see the value of standards anyway. ESPN is mainstream. I can see this actually motivating some of the laggards to upgrading.

Random note and one that is hardly praise for ESPN. I switched from IE to Chimera as my primary browser a year ago simply so I could block their damn popups.