Back and Forth

Stop Laughing at Me!

Do you ever picture Bill Gates laughing when you have to go back and “fix” and otherwise perfectly semantically built layout to make it work in Internet Explorer?

I realized tonight that I do, and that it’s one specific scene that comes to mind, this one:

I’m not entirely sure what Steve has to do with anything, but certainly there’s some evil he’s perpetrated recently that was worth a chuckle.

Man That Was Dumb – Vol. I

This was one of those times where I don’t know whether to be annoyed with myself or annoyed with FireFox; for the moment, however, I choose the latter.

My contact form on jwindesign.com was getting a lot of spam recently. The only validation I had included was checking the format of the e-mail but not much else. So in an effort to curtail some (hopefully all) of the useless e-mails I added an easy math problem to validate something of at least mild intelligence was at the computer. Much to my chagrin the spam kept coming.

What was going on? Did they actually have a team of slaves typing these e-mails one at a time? Couldn’t be. So I started poking around my code to find out what I did wrong, only, everything looked correct. Then I realized the form submitted itself any time you pressed the submit button regardless of my Javascript. The part that confused me was the fact that my submit button wasn’t really a submit button, so why the hell is it submitting?!

The solution: FireFox interprets any button within a form that hasn’t been explicitly declared a “button” with the “type” attribute as a submit button.

I suppose statistically it makes sense, more people will forget to make a button a proper submit even though they intend for it to do just that than folks who don’t want it to submit.

j.winslow design – Site Launch

For the past few years my portfolio at straighaheadmedia.com has served me well. A redesign had been in the works for some time and at this point I also felt it would benefit me to re-brand and make my portfolio a little more personal.

The result: jwindesign.com

The Demise of IE6…Finally

According to the most recent statistics from the W3Counter, Internet Explorer 6 has dropped to around 10% usage. The vitamin supplement for dog
W3Counter represents a sampling of tens of thousands of websites. So, while it's not an exact representation of the entire internet, it should be pretty close. This is fantastic news.

With my obsessive nature, odds are I will continue to check my layouts in IE6 until usage is extinguished. The major benefit, though, will be seen by large organizations. Being able to phase out IE6 support for large complex applications should mean reduced effort for development and, in turn, cost savings.

Web professionals rejoice!