Entry tags:

html, internet explorer, mystery hunt, web

More stuff I learned during Mystery Hunt prep
Ugh, !@#$% Internet Explorer.

I already knew that IE would not display my SVG graphics without a plugin, and I had expected to convert those graphics to GIF or JPG for the web site. (The SVG format was still a very convenient way for my programs to output shapes and letters for the puzzle grids.) But I also converted several other puzzles for the web site besides my own, and fortunately, before the hunt began, somebody looked at my conversion of Race Around the Block in IE.

I had written something like:

<OL>
<LI value=0>Step 0.
<LI value=0>Step 0.
<LI>Step 1.
<LI>Step 2.
<LI>Etc.
</OL>

And this looks like:

0. Step 0.
   
0. Step 0.
   
1. Step 1.
   
2. Step 2.
   
3. Etc.
   

If you are viewing this in Firefox, you will see this list the way it is intended, with two steps numbered 0 and the subsequent ones numbered consecutively starting from 1. But IE gets it wrong, ignoring the value=0 entirely. Strangely enough, it handles LI value correctly for positive numbers, just not for zero or negative list numbers. Somehow, Safari gets it wrong also, though I didn't have an opportunity to play around with it and discover its odd details.

And I know that LI value is considered deprecated in HTML 4 (which this page was DOCTYPEd as) and XHTML 1. But deprecated just means that it is going away in the future and you should avoid using it, but it is still part of the standard. And the replacement for this, counters, is poorly understood and even more poorly supported, so browsers pretty much have to continue to support LI value. I had used this in my work, where I do write HTML that gets displayed in IE, but I had never tried with a 0 list number, and I did not stop to test this page under IE before submitting it, never suspecting that there would be a problem.

Before I could do anything to fix it, one of our other web-savvy members had re-coded this page using a "fake list" CSS style and manual numbering, and I figured that was good considering what we had seen in the alternative. At least, if it broke, it would break without messing up the puzzle.