i summon one kim

Well, this is only for those of you who browse with MSIE: the images on my (non-blog) pages are back. For example, I’m sure the Proxy through SSH document is easier to follow with the screen captures visible, instead of staring at blank spots. (The blog pages were already fixed earlier.)

I wonder how many more times I’m going to be writing about the same problem — it is just so very annoying that I have to at least vent a little after fixing the same thing over and over. This time I had to add an extra <div> element on the pages, which makes it even more frustrating (“unnecessary” extra elements). Well, I put some comments in the code so I’d remember why it is there…

Not that I noticed this one on my own, either. I was talking to someone about a page, and got an odd “what picture?” response. At least I now immediately remember to fire up MSIE when I hear something like that.

Alternative browsers you could switch to: Firefox and Opera.

I have started a new page about NetBSD: the NetBSD Planet is aggregated from a number of feeds that publish NetBSD-related articles. As of now there are seven sources, listed at the bottom of the news page.

I’d be glad to add more feeds to the page, so please send in suggestions either by commenting on this article or by emailing me. Feeds in any RSS version or Atom can be included.

I’ve been taking it easy today just practically invisibly improving the code on this website. The hAtom microformat was brought up recently on one of the WordPress mailing lists, so I thought I’d see about adding support for it here. It was actually rather straightforward: I didn’t even have to rename any of my CSS classes.

The only remaining issue (which is not really an issue at all) is that the post author is not showing up in the the microformat parser I’ve been using to test. According to the hAtom spec the default should come from the XHTML author, which according to my undestanding is specified using the <meta name="author"> tag. I’ve specifically added such a tag, as I don’t display the author in each post, since I feel it would be silly to repeat my name throughout the page.

Since the recommended author data format was hCard I added general support for it on all my pages, too.

As a side effect of all these changes I’ve also fixed a couple of the spots that used to render irritatingly poorly with the Lynx web browser. CSS with its display property was highly useful in keeping up appearances on the other browsers. “Extra” elements added for Lynx can easily be hidden with display: none;. As another example, while <p> is quite useful in adding some extra spacing in Lynx, it is often desirable to undo the effect on other browsers using display: inline;.

The recent Microsot Internet Explorer (IE) problem was bothering me, because it meant the pages were not usable with IE. I wouldn’t mind a cosmetic problem as much (even though they tend to get to me, too) but links not working and pictures not being visible is just too annoying.

I was playing with the CSS, experimenting with the “floating dt” that I had avoided in the last workaround due to it “disappearing” on IE. When I made the dd element floating as well, I saw that IE was rendering the contents below and outside the white box (#envelope) that holds the main content on each page. In the past this has been a giveaway for IE miscalculating the size of the containing element, and sure enough — the “fix” was an added width: 100% property for the misbehaving container.

The “invisible images” were restored to visibility with the same fix on the appropriate container. I’m glad it didn’t need another couple of hours of CSS tweaking in the dark.

It’s nice to have the site working again, but I’d rather not spend my free time on something stupid like inventing workarounds for a buggy browser. (Not that I expect Microsoft to pick up any hints from here.)

Enjoy!

My brother just told me that this site is broken (again) in Microsoft Internet Explorer: the links in the “asides” entries are not clickable and pictures in posts are not visible (but the layout still has their space reserved). This is especially frustrating since there haven’t been any changes to the site code (XHTML or CSS) since September 11th, and everything definitely worked then in both Firefox and IE. Of course, there have been a number of “IE updates” since through Windows Update…

I’d like to fix this right away, but I’m far too busy with other things at the moment. I did try a couple of CSS changes, but didn’t land on the solution yet.

In the mean time: Get Firefox already. :-)