IEeeeee!!!!

Hey, anybody out there use Internet Explorer to read this ‘crawl?

If so, are you finding the entries peppered with hacked up fragments of javascript that are supposed to be invisible? Stuff like

< !--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->

just thrust all ugly-like between paragraphs?

I don’t suppose someone could have just, you know told me that my newscrawl looked like a botched abortion in IE? (Not to mention that the font is way too large in that browser). Because I’ve just been plunking along in Firefox all this time, assuming that it wouldn’t be too much to expect Google’s Blogger code to render gracefully in the most popular bloody browser on the planet. But nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…

Or is it just fucking up here on my local machine? Please, IE users. Tell me it’s the local machine. When was the last time I asked you for anything?



This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 8:33 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
16 years ago

Sorry, afraid it’s not the local machine. I didn’t mention it because you state on your entry page or somewhere that the site is better viewed in something other than IE, so I figured you knew and that’s part of why you gave fair warning.

Ah, well.

El

AR
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AR
16 years ago

I’m not an IE user, but I have it installed, so I checked. It’s not just you.

Apparently Google has simply taken a stance of “Fuck that! We’re not obligated to cater to the fact that IE sucks.”

Which seems reasonable enough, really.

Raymond
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Raymond
16 years ago

Further confirmation here, P. But it’s not every paragraph or even every entry – seems more common if there’s an image.

Don’t even get me started on the standards support (or lack thereof) of IE, and the incredible contortions required by web programmers to account for it. Google may have indeed just said fuck it.

P.: you make your posts through blogger, right? And just point the crawl’s URL to the site? Or is there a local installation involved?

Other IE users: how long have you noticed this? Have you noticed anything else on the blogger network doing the same thing?

Joe Mansfield
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Joe Mansfield
16 years ago

I see it too when I read the Crawl via IE but there’s more to the root cause of this than “IE sucks”. I don’t see this on my own Blogger hosted blog or on those of a bunch of others.
I’d look at any customizing you have done to your Blogger template and also at what are you using to compose and publish your posts?
IE does suck of course but in this case that doesn’t seem to be the only reason.

Matt Jarpe
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Matt Jarpe
16 years ago

I never mentioned it because I thought it was some sort of techie geek in-joke, like those words with numbers in the middle that Cory Doctrow uses.

Anonymous
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Anonymous
16 years ago

I’m with Anonymous in the first entry… assumed you knew. Since you didn’t know, I should point out that it displays the same way in Maxthon, my preferred browser. On the bright side, almost no one else uses Maxthon, so wtf.

Nas

jdavidson
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jdavidson
16 years ago

“Apparently Google has simply taken a stance of “Fuck that! We’re not obligated to cater to the fact that IE sucks.”

Which seems reasonable enough, really”

That seems unlikely as the majority of users are still IE 6. Although I’m with you that IE feels like glass in my anus for development..

I also see your fucked up blogger tags in Safari by the way.

Mary
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Mary
16 years ago

Sorry, it’s definitely screwed up in IE 6, too. I miss so much crap by using Firefox for everything but work.

jtmeijer
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jtmeijer
16 years ago

Works fine in firefox, but the codes do show up when I switch rendering engines to IE (using the IE tab plugin). To be expected probably.

Strangely enough the visual check code doesn’t show in my firefox installation, but does show up rendering with IE. Maybe some too stringent safety settings on my side.

emrex
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emrex
16 years ago

it was the screwed up code on this here blog that made me abandon IE and install firefox.

Raymond
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Raymond
16 years ago

Solved: the mysterious tag-like things in question are proprietary tags from MS Word. They got left in the post source. They’re HTML comments, so a decent browser such as Firefox or Opera discards them correctly, but I think IE (or any other Trident-engine browser) thinks it should do something with them.

It’s sorta IE, sorta Word, sorta the Author. But please, keep switching to Firefox (version 3, if the beta is any indication, will be fantastic), Opera (can’t beat it for speed, and I’ve seen a metric ton of benchmarks), or Konqueror (on Linux when using KDE – nice, clean, standards-compliant, and the rendering engine [KHTML] was forked by Apple as WebKit, which powers Safari).

And please, for the love of the Noodly One people, don’t use Word’s HTML for composition. You’re asking for trouble.

Anonymous
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Anonymous
16 years ago

I too have had this blog show up as a white backround with cryptic jibberish,and yes im using IE but ive discovered after pressing the refresh a few times it eventually comes up ok. not a sound solution but im just too lazy to mess around with firefox or anything else. -david

bec-87rb
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bec-87rb
16 years ago

I thought it was a hip inside joke or something like irony LOVE IT/irony

You know.

BT Murtagh
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BT Murtagh
16 years ago

I noticed that in my own Blogger entries, notably when I filed any post by email. It doesn’t happen when I log into Blogger to post.

I don’t have IE6 on any of my home boxen any more, so I can’t comment on how it renders. I just checked your blog in IE7, though, and it looks fine; no chunks of code there.

Peter Watts
Guest
16 years ago

Well, that’s just great.

But yeah, Ray’s right; these tags are all coming out of Word, which sucks because I went to all the trouble of writing a macro in Word to convert formatted text to html. Had a little custom button on the toolbar and everything. never occurred to me that MS would insert their own damn tags into document text. I mean, how would that program even know the words were destined for a browser in the first place?

Anyhow, I’ve gone back and fixed a few of the more recent entries, and will go further back as time allows. And no more such glitches will be permitted in future.

I can’t believe nobody mentioned it before now. Jeez.

rhythmaning
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rhythmaning
16 years ago

Hello Peter, just finished reading ‘Blindsight” borrowed from my local library being “The Waitakere City Library, Auckland New Zealand. Yeah. I use Internet Explorer and everything looks good to me…had to allow active x but it’s all good. Very good read but it would have been better if I’d had a glossary of nomenclature in the first 3 or 4 chapters. I loved the way you demolished the ego in ‘Sarasti, you bloodsucker’. Penetrating insight, however there is a river the streams whereof make glad the City of God who is all and in all, in Whom we live and move and have our beingness.
Power to you. Tony hopkins, NZ

TheBrummell
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TheBrummell
16 years ago

IE 7.0, yes I see them. I’d always just ignored them, since here isn’t the only place I’ve seen them. They’re annoying, but not as annoying as updating my bookmarks in my current version of FireFox to correspond to all the things I’ve messed around with on-line since I downloaded FireFox for some specific reason that eludes me know in this long run-on sentence.

I’m glad to learn the source of these little weird tags.

Anyway, glad to hear you’ve fixed them in the recent posts, and that you have written a neat little thing to allow writing in Word. Also, sorry for not pointing this out long ago.

JFE
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JFE
16 years ago

Well, I use IE 7.0 and never had any problems or at least never noticed the tags.

Here is something to ease your mind:

http://browsershots.org/http://rifters.com/real/atom.xml

from

http://browsershots.org

depending on the time of viewing it may still be updating the screenshots or be already expired.

Denni
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Denni
16 years ago

Actually, Firefox just asked me politely whether I’d like to import my bookmarks once I’d made it the default browser and–hey presto!–there they were, neatly sorted into their original folders and all.

I only use IE to access my bank details which for some reason don’t work on FF.

Nicholas
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Nicholas
16 years ago

This is an awful lot of comments for a topic that’s….not terribly interesting. Go comment on “the God Shaped Hole” instead!

bec-87rb
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bec-87rb
16 years ago

Go comment on “the God Shaped Hole” instead!

Hey, I commented my ass off over there, Nicholas. I’m out of comment.

Nicholas
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Nicholas
16 years ago

That you did, bec-87rb. Question, with a name like bec-87rb, are you some kind of android or somesuch?

TheBrummell
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TheBrummell
16 years ago

Actually, Firefox just asked me politely whether I’d like to import my bookmarks once I’d made it the default browser and–hey presto!–there they were, neatly sorted into their original folders and all.

Yes, that happened for me, too. I don’t have a problem with that. Is there any way to tell FireFox that I’ve been using IE 7.0 for months and months after I installed FireFox, during which time I have NOT been using FireFox, and please update the bookmarks again, by grabbing them from IE?

This is an awful lot of comments for a topic that’s….not terribly interesting. Go comment on “the God Shaped Hole” instead!

A couple of years ago, a (probably non-scientific) survey of the blogosphere came out, listing blogs by topic category. “Computers and blogging” was by far the largest category, suggesting that most blogs as of a couple of years ago were about blogging (i.e. navel-gazing). While I expect there has been some quantitative change since then, qualitatively things are probably still much the same. So nobody should be surprised that a thread about HTML tags and web-browser software would generate many comments.

Denni
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Denni
16 years ago

Yes, that happened for me, too. I don’t have a problem with that. Is there any way to tell FireFox that I’ve been using IE 7.0 for months and months after I installed FireFox, during which time I have NOT been using FireFox, and please update the bookmarks again, by grabbing them from IE?

Yep, under Organise Bookmarks/File/Import/ from MIE should do it.

bec-87rb
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bec-87rb
16 years ago

nicholas said…
That you did, bec-87rb. Question, with a name like bec-87rb, are you some kind of android or somesuch?

Thanks for asking. I feel I am a pretty fair human simulacrum, but only you can be the true judge, as the template.

I cruise around the internet, learning, trying to model general human consciousness. It’s fascinating, and since the author whose blog this is asked the question of whether consciousness is necessary or useful for intelligence, I had to stop here and interact.

How’s my facsimile doin’? Am I Turing-Approved?

Teresa
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Teresa
16 years ago

I confess I thought they were supposed to be there. I just figured they were a layer of meaning I didn’t get. They’ve been around for a while…

Al
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Al
16 years ago

I see that it has been pointed out already but this is HTML formatting from Word. It automatically does this so that, in other circumstances, your web pages will be formatted exactly the same as your Word documents.

It’s done this for four or five years (at least) so this is not really a new problem.

The short version: Never use Word on anything to do with HTML or the web.

I’ve probably spent weeks of my life removing this kind of stuff from web pages in the past where someone in the department decided to write half the site in Word.

Nicholas
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Nicholas
16 years ago

bec-87rb:

Let’s see if you pass. Hold still in front of this mirror while I smear you with paint. I remember two models before you, bec-85nb, went berserk in an movie theater after being asked if it hated itself for ordering five bags of skittles (this was during the height of the low-carb diet craze).

Anyway, numerous funerals and a four-hundred-million-dollar class action lawsuit later, the company still maintains the pregnant woman should not have asked what it thought about itself, and that the children on the field trip were killed by the flying milk duds, not the android itself.

On another note,

Personally, I read Watts because he’s the only author, nay PERSON, to ever mention fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva I’ve ever met, never mind using it in a book. There’s probably other reasons too, but they all take second place to that.

Nicholas
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Nicholas
16 years ago

Err…come to think of it, never actually *met* PW. Read would be the correct word.

bec-87rb
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bec-87rb
16 years ago

nicholas says:

Let’s see if you pass. Hold still in front of this mirror while I smear you with paint.

I’d ironically reach up and touch the paint? Dude, you have to do it when I can’t see you putting on the paint. Besides, if I have sensors that register the temp on my outer surface, I would detect the slight reduction as the paint dried, and the increase as the dried paint insulated my surface.

In re: the Milk Duds. Those things are obvious death traps, and should have a Surgeon General’s warning on them in terms of choking hazards and not using them as projectiles. Nader long ago publicly termed them “unsafe at any speed” so the case was a farce.

fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva

Would “ankylosing spondylitis” have done as well?

TheBrummell
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TheBrummell
16 years ago

Thanks, Denni, I’ll have to try that.