CSS being killed on Mac

June 20, 2002 9:54 AM

More than a few threads have had the css broken by tags like this:

It completely kills the stylesheet in IE5 on mac. Anyone else notice this problem? Are these tags added by the person posting, or are they part of the server side processes? I've been irked by the digression to no left margin, default font mess the page becomes because of this.
posted by Jeremy to MetaFilter-Related at 9:54 AM (9 comments total)

well crap! it is actually a tag that looks like this: <\>

But on preview it converted to the non-ascii character and rendered in the html. DumbDumbDumb!
posted by Jeremy at 9:58 AM on June 20, 2002

We discussed this a couple of weeks ago. Short story is that it doesn't break the CSS for Wintel users (or, perhaps, *nix users) so they know not what they do to the Mac users of MeFi.

Barring a mass realization that it isn't a good idea, the only other options are hoping that Matt implements a fix (back-end or a "no fake tag" edict) or learning to live with it.
posted by Dreama at 10:26 AM on June 20, 2002

I figured as much! Thanks for the info.
posted by Jeremy at 10:35 AM on June 20, 2002

If I throw in a fake tag, I type this:

<fake tag><\fake tag>

which I hope results in this:

<fake tag><\fake tag>

Does that break somebody's browser?
posted by timeistight at 10:43 AM on June 20, 2002

Correction: If I throw in a fake tag, I type this:

ampersandlt;fake tagampersandgt;ampersandlt;\fake tagampersandgt;

(I think you know what I mean; MeFi keeps interpreting my ampersands for me.)
posted by timeistight at 11:33 AM on June 20, 2002

That method has no ill effects on my browser. Could it be the automatic tag closer that is making the empty tags?
posted by Jeremy at 11:44 AM on June 20, 2002

I've noticed this too while using the computers at school. I won't tell you what it does to Netscape 4.x on Unix, but I'm sure you can use your imagination.
posted by Succa at 4:16 PM on June 20, 2002

Earlier today I visited this thread using Mozilla 1.0 RC2 on Mac OS X and I had no idea what you were talking about (i.e., it didn't break anything). Now I'm here using IE 5.2 for Mac OS X and oh! there it is. Effing MS; most of the bugs I noticed under 5.1 are still here.
posted by mcwetboy at 6:09 PM on June 20, 2002

Yeah, the 5.2 really should have been called 5.1.1.
posted by kindall at 10:19 PM on June 20, 2002