Betalogue

For those readers who accessed Betalogue in the past 18 hours or so using Safari, my apologies for the screwed-up look of the home page. For some reason, one of the recently posted blog entries was missing a closing blockquote tag — and Safari didn’t like that at all.

Explorer and Camino were not affected. But the fact that the closing blockquote tag was missing in the page caused Safari to screw up the entire CSS layout of the page, displaying the left-hand side menu on top of the main content area.

Luckily, instead of trying to fiddle with my CSS to fix the problem, I first saved the home page as an HTML file, opened it in BBEdit and asked BBEdit to check the syntax. That’s where it told me that a closing blockquote tag was missing. I added the tag, reloaded the page, and everything was back in order.

It was a good lesson nonetheless: A part of me was immediately tempted to think that it was some weird, obscure Safari bug that had popped up out of nowhere, and that I had to fiddle with the CSS code to work around it. But it didn’t make sense: If it was a bug in Safari, it shouldn’t have popped up out of nowhere and affect a page that was not affected the day before. New bugs are expected to occur when you install a new version of the software, or try to view a new page with the software. Neither applied here.

To the rational mind, this was obviously a problem caused by something in my blog code that wasn’t there the day before. So it was obviously a problem with one of the latest entries that I had posted.

It’s a good thing another part of me was reasonable enough to sense this, and to lead me to try and check the syntax with BBEdit.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, December 9th, 2003 at 12:02 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.