The IE legacy of the day

My HTML exploration probably peaked in the days of Netscape 4 and IE 4, so I’ve been left with many bad habits from those grim days when standards were little more than a twinkle in the eye (as opposed to now, where to most they’re still little more than a wailing infant).

All programmers have a history of silly things that caught them out and resulted in an immense amount of time wasted. My favourite one comes from when I was teaching a Delphi course to UNISA students in the day. Syntax such as:

if (a = b)

is perfectly acceptable in Delphi. Later that evening, I was ready to code up a storm in Perl. However I got stuck early on, and spent ages trying to work out why some logic wasn’t working properly. It turns out I was using something like:

if ($a = $b)

instead of

if ($a == $b)

A miserable equal sign cost me a good night’s sleep (and I also relearned the rule that if you don’t see something immediately, take a break – you’ll probably see it quickly when you return).

This week’s mistake, while it didn’t cost me much time, meant there was a bug on a site for much longer than there needed to be.

Anyone who knows HTML can tell you that


<a href='blah.php' target='_blank'>

will open up the page in a new window, right? Wrong. Firefox is a little more picky than that, and the line needs to read:


<a href='blah.php' target="_blank">

It’s the first time I’ve ever known of a difference between double quotes and single quotes in HTML. I tend to use single quotes all the time, since in PHP

$x = "<h3 class='c'>Take me to $place/h3>";

is a lot easier than

$x = '<h3 class="c">Take me to '.$place.'</h3>';

Live and learn 🙂