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).<\/p>\n
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: <\/code><\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Anyone who knows HTML can tell you that<\/p>\n <\/code><\/p>\n Live and learn \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… Continue reading The IE legacy of the day<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metal-technical","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nif (a = b)
\n<\/code>
\nis 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:
\n
\nif ($a = $b)
\n<\/code>
\ninstead of
\n
\nif ($a == $b)<\/p>\n
\n<a href='blah.php' target='_blank'>
\n<\/code>
\nwill open up the page in a new window, right? Wrong. Firefox is a little more picky than that, and the line needs to read:<\/p>\n
\n<a href='blah.php' target=\"_blank\">
\n<\/code>
\nIt’s the first time I’ve ever known of a difference between double quotes and single quotes in HTML. I tend to use single quotes all the time, since in PHP
\n
\n$x = \"<h3 class='c'>Take me to $place\/h3>\";
\n<\/code>
\nis a lot easier than
\n
\n$x = '<h3 class=\"c\">Take me to '.$place.'<\/h3>';<\/p>\n