I just killed WordPress

Well, that was kinda fun. I was trying to create a post, and when after I edited a <pre>, something I did killed WordPress within Firefox on my MacBook. So I went inside and tried it on my frankenmac, and Firefox died there… three times. Odd. So I turned on my trusty old PC, and it crashed Firefox there too!

Finally, I opened Opera for Windows and it brought up a post with all the categories and title set, but with an empty text box. Guess I have to delete that post, and try again! Boo!

Firefox for Mac and displaying small font sizes

So I had a problem a while back where I thought Firefox for Mac was picking up some left-over or un-overridden size styles, while the other browsers were not. It turns out that it wasn’t actually my problem.

While all of the other browsers that I tested… for both Windows and Mac display the default font (serif) set to .8em as glyphs that are 9 pixels tall, Firefox for Mac displays glyphs that are 8 pixels tall, but with 1 pixel of anti-aliasing on top. The difference of one pixel usually doesn’t mean much, but when dealing with font-sizes that small, it makes a big visual difference.

I submitted a Mozilla bug report which has not yet been picked up, but I’m not sure if there’s anything to be done, especially if the rendering engine is at all based on the system software (doubtful, since none of the other browsers work the same way). I wonder if the release of MacOSX Leopard is going to affect this.

Gotta love the Mozilla people, though. It’s such a relief that you can even submit a bug report for something like this. A chance for actual interaction, and a chance to better the product. I only wish Microsoft would pay a little attention.

Problem du jour: Firefox fonts

Goal for today: figure out why Firefox for Mac is displaying drastically smaller font-sizes than Firefox for Windows.

Why this may be difficult: I don’t have a Mac to use at work.

RSS newsreaders

I am a big fan of Sage, the RSS newsreader plugin for Firefox. In my move, I have tried a few other apps that I thought would be a little better at handling the on-again, off-again nature of me checking my favorite feeds.

I tried Vienna for mac, as it was free, and it worked on my laptop (since I had already packed up the other computers). I liked it fair enough. One of my problems was the keystrokes required to mark all the posts in one feed read, but… aside from that, I had no real problem. (I learned a trick though, the listed keystroke is apple-shift-k, but really, all you have to press is k by itself! Useful, but still on the right hand side… not ergonomic enough.)

Since the PC was the first computer unpacked other than the laptop, I thought that I would give a windows reader a try. I settled on FeedDemon. I like the stuff it does on its own… the type of display, the checking, and the default behavior of folders. The thing I can not stand is the poor usability of the application. The keystroke for marking all feeds in a folder as read is fairly similar to the browser reload… it’s control-shift-r. My brain defaults to that occasionally. The real problem is that it has a separate keystroke for marking all posts in one feed as read, which is control-shift-a. Well, as my brain is hardwired for r, I have pressed that on more than one occasion when trying to mark all posts in a feed as read. What does this do? Well, it marks all posts in the folder I am in as read… and since I imported an OPML feed, it marks all of my feeds as read!!! I’ve already done that at least 5 times. Yes, it is trivial in the grand scheme of life, death, and taxes, but not insignificant for me.

I think that I am likely to go back to Vienna for the moment, with SharpReader (oldie with no bells-or-whistles, but it works the way I would expect) at work. If Vienna can’t convince me pretty soon, I may have to go back to Sage. (Further stating what a great plugin it is).

Pushing Browsers

So I have been working on a small piece of navigation at work. Tabs, to be exact. Multiple items, but no more than 5 at a time. Variable length titles (including some rather long). As it is a list of links, of course, I wanted to use an unordered list. It all made perfect semantic sense. Just spit out the list, add some CSS for the tab look, and done.

However, there were requirements for its behavior. The tabs were not allowed to wrap around to the next line. They also could not just drift off the right side of the page. Everything had to be shown. And it was alright for the individual tabs to wrap and grow taller. Basically, I was told the nav had to act like a table, just not in so many words.

Because I am likely more standards-driven than most doing similar work, I wanted to stick with the list. Doesn’t make any sense to have non-tabular data in a table, I thought. Within a few minutes, I had found a semi-solution. W3C recommends the display attribute having a “table-cell” property, which was just what I was looking for. Threw it in my code, hit reload in Firefox, and wham, there it was. Needed a slight bit of tweaking, but it was working for the most part. Then I alt-tab’bed over to IE7….

Nothing.

Low and behold, Microsoft hasn’t added that to IE. Of course not. Why would they? It’s only been in the recommendation since… you know, May 1998. At least! (I don’t have the heart to look any further back).

I am not “new” as my sister would say… I know how it is. I hadn’t expected it to be there, but the more work I had to do on an alternate table-based solution, the more it annoyed me. I keep hearing more and more about the CSS3 recommendation, adding more elements to HTML 5, and all of these other grand documents, which all currently amount to little-to-nothing. Maybe I am missing the point, but if 1998 is going to be ignored, why should 2008 be any different?

I am going to keep this rant short, the rant wasn’t really the point. The greater point is that was enough of a call-to-action for me. That’s what it took to realize I should start looking into what I can do about giving certain browsers a push in the right direction. They seem to be lost.