Welcome to my new Ode site! More...
Fri, 24 Sep 2010
I witnessed a peculiar thing as I was testing this theme on my web host's server...
Originally, I used <p id="content_header"> to hold the ASCII fish header image, and set #content_header to preserve whitespace with white-space:pre. However, I noticed that in Internet Explorer 6–8 the ASCII fish was not drawn completely; it's as if the characters comprising the ASCII fish were being shot out of a fire hose, which overwhelmed IE's rendering pipeline and hosed the fish before it got done rendering.
This bug only rears its ugly head when the page is loaded from a remote web server; it renders fine when the page is loaded from your hard drive or local server.
The fix was very simple: I just changed <p id="content_header"> to <pre id="content_header"> and removed the white-space:pre property from #content_header. You can still reproduce the bug by going back in time to the Monochrome beta page.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Mauris vel magna. Mauris risus nunc, tristique varius, gravida in, lacinia vel, elit. Nam ornare, felis non faucibus molestie, nulla augue adipiscing mauris, a nonummy diam ligula ut risus. Praesent varius. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
After solving a strange rendering bug in IE, I'm finally done with my first Ode theme. It's called Monochrome, and it was inspired by the monochrome monitors that introduced me to an exciting new digital world when I was a child. I don't know how many hours of my childhood were lost in those green scanlines, but they paved the way to a decent career.