Debugging is hell
After launching the Bryant Park site, we stumbled upon two curious bugs.
First, the site completely exploded on the Mac. All browsers. Only about half the styles were applied correctly—layout was all over the place. But, it worked like a champ on the Windows side. IE/Mozilla, take your pick. After a bit of exploration, I noticed that the every class declaration in the stylesheet had a extra period. It would look like this:
..selected { color: #9c3; }
…instead of:
.selected { color: #9c3; }
Subtle right? The question was, how did they get there? Anyway, I re-send the stylesheet to Bryant Park, thinking that someone got a little carried away with search and replace or something. But the client gets the file and there are still double periods! Apparently, sending a CSS file though my webmail adds periods to every line that begins with a period. Someone will have to explain that one to me. But all is well. I zipped up the file and resent. Perfect.
That got me through another six hours before we notice that the site wouldn’t render in IE5/Mac. Nothing. It would hang forever before giving an error message. But only in IE/Mac. It worked in Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Camino, Netscape 6, Netscape 7, IE5/Win, and IE6/Win.
What was so vexing was that it was only on the live site. IE5/Mac worked fine when pointing to Moment’s testing server. Same code, but it worked. It worked locally on my development PowerBook using Apache. Same code. Huh???
Ah, but then the light bulb went off. I noticed that it was slower on IE than any other browser. After a few minutes of flailing around I figured it out. I was referencing an empty CSS file using the method to hide styles from Netscape 4 and to prevent the dreaded FOUC bug. Anyway, adding a comment to the file solved the problem. Now it is just as speedy as ever. Or it will be once the files are updated on the live server, which should happen by tomorrow morning.
I actually had a lot of fun coding this site. XHTML, CSS for layout, and picking up PHP for the first time was great. However, debugging code was why I stopped taking computer science classes at Carnegie Mellon. Maybe I should just stick to information architecture.
