Write the web page. Check how it looks in browser of choice. Validate the XHTML. Validate the CSS. Double-check in alternative browser. Job done. Surely the worst that can happen in other browsers is that some things are a few pixels out of alignment?
Not quite. Because, despite being well-formed and perfectly valid (it even has a nice W3C badge on the bottom), most of the content was completely invisible in the two most popular web browsers.
The problem is Internet Explorer’s handling of the <script> tag. IE will not let you use a “self-closed” script tag (e.g. <script src=”myscript.js” />). It’s well-formed XML, and perfectly valid XHTML, just like the other self-closed tags IE allows, but IE assumes it is unclosed and therefore ignores the remainder of the content (at least until it hit a </script> tag belonging to another script further down the page). Brilliant. I’ve no idea what the justification for this is and, to be honest, I don’t care. I’d like to curse the ineptitude of Microsoft, change the page and that would be that. But no, I can’t just ignore it because it’s a bloody conspiracy. Firefox behaves in exactly the same way. So the lesson to take from this is: Opera and Safari – sensible; IE and Firefox – insane.
To be honest, I was already aware of this bug, in IE at least, because I had come across it once before (this makes it doubly frustrating). On that occasion I was editing the XHTML with IntelliJ IDEA, which very helpfully highlighted the problematic tag with a warning that it would not work with IE. For this page I used Vim, so no such help.
What is most annoying, and embarrassing, is that this page has been like this for ages (I can’t remember how long), displaying nothing but the Feedburner view of this blog, and a big white space, to most visitors (and sometimes I get literally several hits a week). I admit that the rest of the content is very minimal and not particularly interesting, but I’d prefer it if it was the visitors that chose to ignore it rather than their browsers.
Yes, yes… I know I was asking for trouble by neglecting to test in either of the most popular browsers. I have learned my lesson (until next time at least). Assumption truly is the mother of all fuck-ups.