It’s happened again; the right column on this blog no longer appears in IE, though I see it just fine in FireFox and can see it in the source code. Update: with this post, now it’s back. Wonder what the heck’n is goin’ on?
Now, I know that a web page should validate, for a’ that, for a’ that. But ye noble FRL readers who validate code in your sleep and could write a well-formed RSS 2 feed by hand at gunpoint: of the twelve errors and assorted warnings kicked out by the W3C validator, do you see one that would cause the right column to disappear? Something in a post, perhaps (since I haven’t tinkered with the templates since early January)?
I have discovered that Flickr posts generate invalid code, and that every widget I’ve added to FRL has had some kind of problem with it that I mean to fix… after May 10. Furthermore, I see embedding errors created while writing posts; Movable Type won’t warn you if it creates bad markup (markup you don’t see internally). But this is the second time I’ve seen this happen. I thought I fixed it last time by reapplying the stylesheet and rebuilding, but I’m now guessing that was just coincidental.
I suppose I could add a note, “Optimized for FireFox!”
Posted on this day, other years:
- Literary Journals: Survival and Preservation - 2009
- AT&T Using Calling Cards to Diss E-Rate - 2005
- London Calling: International Internet Librarian - 2005
- Talks and Tours, 2005 - 2005
- Google Picks Atom for Syndication - 2004
Don’t worry about the complaints about & character.
I would start by fixing the style attribute for some reason enclosed in curly brackets for (I think) selector. {style=”…”} is not correct – it looks like a mix of CSS standalone format and inline html format. It is possible that the { confuses IE so much, that it does not close the tag and the parser never recovers.
Otherwise, looks for things like unclosed div and table tags. Those could trip the browsers as well.
I confess that I knew that style code was funky when I pasted it in there and didn’t fix it. So I’ll concentrate on that… it’s interesting how it comes and goes!
Whenever I’ve run into disappearing divs — it’s usually a case of not having “position: relative;” in the affected div, or the elements therein. But don’t quote me on that.
I wouldn’t say to not worry about the complaints about the & character. It probably won’t affect anything but it still breaks your “xml” document. When creating urls in an XHTML document that have & in them, use & a m p ; (without the spaces, your software is translating & in to & if I don’t have the spaces). & is a special character to indicate an entity is going to start. Browsers will handle & a m p ; in urls correctly. (Or at least I’ve never seen one that doesn’t).
Also fixing that reduces the warnings and errors and might help you actually fix the issue.
That’s about all the advice I can give without looking at it deeper.
Jon Gorman