Comments on: Sometimes, even jQuery can’t save you from yourself

By: Bryan Matthews

Bryan Matthews — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:06:54 +0000

On a related note, I know that some versions of IE will treat an invalid self-closing tag as if it were a start tag without an end tag, whereas firefox (and others) seems to be inclined to close it for you. This can be hard to track down at times.

By: Mark Shiffer

Mark Shiffer — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:06:20 +0000

Thanks Dave. I don’t work with web applications too much any longer, but still found this as an interesting read. Your point about validating HTML is well taken, and hopefully I’ll remember it as I get back into web development again in the future.

-Mark

By: Bob Armour

Bob Armour — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:16:52 +0000

That’s a good reason TO use firebug’s HTML (DOM) view – compare it with the output from ‘View Source’ and you might spot some of the ‘help’ that the browser is giving you. By saving the output from both views, to separate text files, and using a decent Diff tool (Beyond Compare, for example), any differences shoudl be obvious.

The same theory applies to IE ‘View Source’ and DeveloperTools DOM view.

By: nelson

nelson — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:18:25 +0000

Good thing to point out…

However, you really shouldn’t be using that markup in the first place. A cell without a row just makes no sense, and it’s very much invalid.

I think a bigger lesson to learn here is to always write the most valid markup you can.

By: Glenn

Glenn — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:31:25 +0000

Be careful using Firebug’s HTML for low-level tracing like this — it will sometimes correct a “problem” — the actual view source is required.

I was missing a closing tag and FireBug closed it for me. That missing closing tag was causing all sorts of grief in IE. Took several hours before I checked raw source.

As always, enjoy reading your articles.

By: Bob Armour

Bob Armour — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:21:58 +0000

I too have been bitten by IE’s propensity to ‘help’ (And currently by a thousand midegs – but we won’t go into that one!)

The whole history of browser compatibility and ‘broken’ websites has not really been made any easier by the fact that browsers silently (or other wise) correct our mistakes. If they had never sone this in the first plac, then developers everywhere (myself included) would have been forced to produce correct markup, and there would be one less problem to think about.

Having your webpage fail immediately may seem to be a bit draconian, but the failure would be immediate and visible, not delayed and ‘lurking’.

Oh well, in a perfect world…

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:55:27 +0000

never question the jquery!

thanks for this much needed reminder that sometimes the problem is right in front of your face, and almost always, that problem was your fault!

By: Harvey Kandola

Harvey Kandola — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:42:10 +0000

We had something similar: an unclosed IMG tag actually killed IE6 stone dead!

Took us ages to find the issue.

By: The Morning Brew - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #639

The Morning Brew - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #639 — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:35:34 +0000

[...] Sometimes, even jQuery can’t save you from yourself – Dave Ward tells the tail of a seemingly cross browser issue that jQuery did not protect him from, and how it actually was caused by a mistake in his HTML, highlighting some interesting differences in how different browsers handle incorrect markup. [...]

By: Russ Cam

Russ Cam — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 21:44:09 +0000

Dave, I’ve made exactly the same mistake before, those pesky tables!

By: thorn

thorn — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:06:22 +0000

Yeah, I ran into a similar issue. With tables too. I called .hide() for a detached element just created with $(…html code from a server…) call. It was TR. Then this TR was added to a table and some time after that it had to be shown with .show() call. But it didn’t want to show correctly in Firefox. And this time a problem was with jQuery. Its implementation of hide()/show() saves an initial value of the property display into element’s data and then uses it to show the element. But this value for a detached TR in Firefox is ‘block’, not ‘table-row’. My dumb fix looked like this:

$newTr.hide();
if ($.browser.mozilla)  $newTr.data('olddisplay', 'table-row');

By: Cyril Gupta

Cyril Gupta — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:22:12 +0000

Dave,

Lesson learnt.

By: Dave Ward

Dave Ward — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:29:58 +0000

The Firefox Web Developer addon has an option in the tools menu called “Validate Local HTML” that sends your generated HTML to the W3C validator instead of just validating by URI. Just keep in mind that it’s sent to the validator in cleartext and be sure not to validate anything sensitive that way.

By: Pickles

Pickles — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:09:12 +0000

Do the W3C validators work on Javascript generated HTML or do you have some other tools for that?

By: Tweets that mention Sometimes, even jQuery can’t save you from yourself | Encosia -- Topsy.com

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:02:02 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dave Ward, Chris Love. Chris Love said: Sometimes, even jQuery can’t save you from yourself http://bit.ly/dsiRsR @encosia #webdev #html [...]