providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world

Quote of the Week:

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.
-Gaston Bachelard

Notes from Notchcode

7.27.2006

Semicolon Hell


Just spent the last three hours scratching my head over a font-display problem on a site I'm developing: Safari was showing the correct font-family attribute, however all the other browsers weren't. The rest of the style sheet was being utilized, but for some reason, the font wasn't. Here's what the typical font-family CSS declaration looked like:

font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; Lucida-Grande, 'Lucida Sans', 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, sans-serif;

ok, so you see the problem? If you spot it in under three hours, you can have a job with me.

Of course, the issue is with the semicolon right after 'Lucida Grande'...that effectively ends the declaration right there, and ignores the rest of the string.

Big Duh, right there. I did about a hundred other things before eleting all but the basic generic font-family declaration, and as I was doing that, I noticed the ill-placed semicolon. The good thing is that it's all better now, and I can move forward with actually getting a site proof online for the client to look at. But let this be a warning: if you prototype in Safari, it will let the semicolon pass, and read the whole line...Firefox, IE, Netscape, and Opera won't. It goes without saying you should always double-check your homework before handing it in, but I'd also say you should double-check it while in-process, and make sure you're not missing something stupid or obvious or just plain odd that may eat into your development time as you're prepping the site to go out the door.

posted at 3:17 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

Leave your comments here: 0 comments


Business Blog Top Sites
Subscribe with Bloglines
View Alan Bucknam's profile on LinkedIn

Add to Technorati Favorites