Peter's Blog

I had a complaint from a loyal reader about this site not rendering properly on IE. It got half way through my article on Ruby Metaclasses and stopped.

The problem was caused by my using the term <object> in my text and the wilki filter not changing the < and > into html entities. IE treated <object> as a keyword and tried to download a trojan or whatever it does in those circumstances. Presumably firefox saw that the semantics were totally wrong (for example, no attributes to direct it to a specific object) and ignored it.

Since I use firefox and I don't proof read ever article in every available browser this one slipped through.

Apologies for interruption of service.

And thanks again Dean for your concern.

Only just noticed that the msn desktop search toolbar has added tabbed browsing to internet explorer. How long has that been there? I only use IE to debug web sites so I hadn't noticed. Don't care, still won't use it.

Working on a web site, trying to get it to look ok in both Firefox and IE. Firefox is ok, a large GIF image on the site renders in the size I would expect, about 600x400. In IE however, it is shown proportionally larger as if zoomed in a bit and hence the site looks poor, especially as the resizing has distorted the image.

Looking through IE options there is nothing to control this. Text Zoom only alters text size, not the size of images.

On a hunch I looked at my Display settings in Control Panel. I had the font size (Display/Settings/Advanced) set extra large, 132 dpi. I tend to use large fonts because of my poor eyesite. I reset the font size to normal (96 dpi) and did the mandatory reboot and, lo and behold, images in IE were of normal size and my website looked publishable.

It's one thing having to either use large fonts or squint all the time, it's another when MS are plotting to make all websites look awful to the optically challenged.