Broken Blog

STDERR:
http://www.drozmonkey.com/2009/04/27/if-you-give-a-mom-a-muffin/ Error C3861
‘mso-style-name’: identifier not found, even with argument-dependent lookup
render: *** [Internet Explorer HTML rendering] Error 2

Possible developers responsible for errors
http://www.drozmonkey.com/2009/04/27/if-you-give-a-mom-a-muffin/: Jenny(4/27/2009)

As if trying to keep all the builds at work stable wasn’t enough to do, it looks like some careless blogger at home decided to recklessly submit a post which broke the blog on some browsers. The customary punishment for breaking the build blog, besides being shamed publicly, will be expected tomorrow morning. To be clear, said punishment is breakfast, preferably breakfast tacos.

So what really happened is funny. If you didn’t see a problem with Jenny’s post yesterday then you are probably using a browser other than Internet Explorer (IE), such as my preferred browser Firefox. Jenny had copied and pasted the text from an email that she had gotten in Outlook which is set to use Word as the editor. When she pasted it into the blog, it didn’t paste as plain text, but rather it carried along invisible formatting. IE was not able to decipher the formatting correctly and barfed on it. The hilarious part is that this happened because the text came from Microsoft Word. Yes, Microsoft makes both Word and IE, but IE couldn’t render it while Firefox could.  As funny as that is, you might think that this is not really Jenny’s fault, but this isn’t the first time this has happened. The last time this happened I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out how I broke the blog only to find this was the issue. At that time, I explained it to Jenny to which she replied, “So that is what the ‘Paste from Word’ button in WordPress is for.” Touché, I wasn’t even aware of that button, but yes, that is what it is for. I was willing to let it slide the first time, but not twice.

All are welcome for the tacos tomorrow, but please note that once the <FOOD> email notification goes out they probably won’t last long.