I know we’re up to IE8 now, and IE9 is deliciously around the corner somewhere, waiting to pounce upon us. We’ve reached a point in our lives where many of us web designers can now tell IE6 support to bugger off… and actually get away with it. But IE7 still has an unfortunate market share, and in Mindfly Studio‘s case it’s something we still actively support for clients because they have enough users of that variety to make it a worry.

Most of the time, this isn’t an issue. We are, dare I say, good at what we do. But there are times where we’re required to use certain antiquated CMSes for a client that can’t switch out of that environment… and the problems begin to kick in. Code you can’t completely control is bound to be code that is going to repeatedly kick you in the nuts.

Gentlemen, I like my nuts.

Last week I spent almost two full days having the boys repeatedly booted by a hotel reservation CMS’s code that was making my best attempts at goods practice CSS and HTML look instead like what happens when you stuff a stick of dynamite in a sock packed with rancid meat. No matter how I tried to wrestle things around, IE7 was determined to kick into Quirks Mode, doing the most unexpected, unusual things to my layout.

I eventually got better, but I’d very much like to email a shovel to either the CMS’s manufacturer or Microsoft with a note explaining where to shove said farm implement.

To those of you trapped on corporate intranets forever, let me say how badly I feel for you. I can only imagine that this is your daily toil, your repentance for some unspoken crimes. But for the rest of us, let me say how glad I am that we can see an end date out there for Quirks Mode and it’s foul, reprehensible style-mangling.

P.S.: Wouldn’t Pete make a great representation of mild-mannered Bruce Banner? (Cue Lonely Man)

I don’t know if this is a problem in other libraries, but I suspect it is. But I do know that it’s happened to me when using jQuery’s Ajax functions.

Why is this occurring?

I was tormenting myself with this same question on a client project, and discovered that although a bit of browser quirkiness was involved, it was actually an error on my part.

I hate it when it’s me. ;)

As it turns out, I had an extra trailing comma at the end of the last element in my array. For example, in the following array:

{“gamesImDroolingFor”:[{"developer":"Blizzard","title:"Diablo III"},{"developer":"Square Enix","title":"Final Fantasy XIII"},]}

You’ll notice that there’s a comma after the last game’s bracket (which has been turned red for emphasis).

Firefox will ignore that comma, since clearly there’s no new object after it. Internet Explorer, the special child of the web, isn’t quite so bright, so it adds an extra, blank element to the array it creates.

Go IE.

The solution is easy, of course. Remove the unneeded comma.

I hope this helps prevent other developers from driving themselves batty trying to figure out what’s going wrong with their own arrays.

When it comes to web developers, it seems to be pretty much hate. Granted, I’m on that page, as I’ve spent more than a few hours of a client’s budget trying to get IE7 (let alone IE6) render a site properly. Or even close to properly. I’d say almost half of my posts so far at my Mindfly blog are a testament to this fact.

But there is a point where people get rabid. I explore that theme in this week’s comic.

I understand that crucifying Dean Hachamovitch (the dev team’s general manager and author of this heavily hated/loved IEBlog entry – and no, I can’t pronounce it) might be going a bit too far. For that matter, displaying Jeffrey Zeldman in a Pontius Pilate role might be taking metaphors to excess. But I can’t help but feel that when it comes to browsers, we’re so full of rhetoric that any actual message, be it pro or con, usually gets lost in the rabid barking. Ultimately, they’re not evil zealots, nor saints. They’re just guys making code. It just happens to be code for the most widely used browser on the web… which probably means they need more coffee breaks than most of us to stay calm.

In case it needs to be said, I’m not encouraging anyone being hung up on a cross. That’d be bad form.