Well Cat fans, as if the ding dong about hedges wasn't enough, I thought I'd just have a little babble (something you're all terribly un-used to ;-)
You may know I'm poshing it up in Chelsea at the moment because my flat's having a load of work done to it. I thought this would be a great opportunity to get a load of work done that I've been putting off (because I'm not very good at it). Sadly, all I've really accomplished is to prop up the alcoholic drinks industry.
Also I've been confronted by something I'm going to call the 'Firefox/Coofer Cat rendering bug' (a snappy name, you'll agree). This is where the page loads, but the browser stretches it wider than the window, so you get a horizontal scroll bar. I'm really struggling to fix it - every time I make a change, the browser decides to behave, so I think it's sorted. Then at some random time in the future (usually when I should be doing something else) it goes wrong again.
I'm planning a bit of a re-vamp, perhaps time to change the layout and look of the site. As usual, I'm aiming for "looks good in Firefox" and "works well enough in IE". Anyone got any ideas?
Comments
i'm a firefox user and viewing this page gives me the error.i've just used firefox's validators as follows:
HTML - this failed with loads of errors but i've had this before where one mistook can cause utter mayhem!
CSS - this passed
the link to the mirror's web site (you classy lad ;) doesn't contain a question mark and i've had this before where not having & and having the ampersand character itself causes problems.i've no idea if this is really the cause of this problem?
being layout, it would suggest a CSS bug and having peeped at the CSS for Wiki in the past i'm astonished it hangs together at all - there is shed loads of it :o
is it worth renting a few minutes on one of those VNC browser tester sites to enable you to check out how the cat looks from a wide range of platforms and browsers?
interestingly, from the firefox context menu, i've just enabled "web developer->information->display block size" and the page instantly resized itself to look correct!hmm, me thinks there is summat not write here!oh, and i've just resized the window (using the M$ windows buttons top right) and the numbers shown didn't change which means the tool to display the block sizes must trawl the page and render something on-screen then end...strange that doing a read of the page causes a re-rendering of the entire page?
even weird-er... i've just had a peep at this very page (www.coofercat.com/2005/113) with the DOM Inspector, it's a neat little window (i've never used it before) that renders the page in a sub-window and shows the DOM information above... interestingly, the "width" value was the same if the page renders correctly or too wide!the BODY element also has the same width for all width values...
i'm not enough of an expert to know what the best debugging approach is but i'd suggest a little bit of javascript to trawl all your page and display all the width values (for everything) and noting anything that's not consistent?
EEK!
knobs...
Yeah, it's weird all right. I've tried validation, and it generally fails on places where I've hammed up the URLs by just pasting them in and not XMLifying them. However, that alone is not the problem...
I agree about the CSS - it really needs dumping and redoing. If I do a full redesign, I'll be doing loads of CSS hacking as part of it (and as CC uses very little of Tiki, I can probably dump 80% of the CSS with no ill-effects).
As for viewing, I found that even resising the window and putting it back fixes it. This is as much a Firefox problem as it is HTML/CSS. That said, it seems to behave itself a lot more than it used to (I found making a couple of tables 99% instead of 100% seemed to do that). Still, it's not good, so it needs sorting.