When Printing Kills
Here’s a fascinating little tidbit: on some users’ machines, attempts to print out Joe Clark’s ALA article “Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility” would crash Internet Explorer. The error message mentioned a script error in line 1401: “Object doesn’t support this property or method”. Funny thing: we weren’t doing any scripting. The error was actually occurring shdoclc.dll/preview.dlg, which is of course a piece of the operating system.
Jason did some sleuthing and traced the crash to this line of markup:
<h2 id="tags">Tags and structure</h2>
Honestly, that was it. So Jeffrey renamed the ID to read:
<h2 id="structure">Tags and structure</h2>
So far as we know, no more crashing in Explorer.
Ain’t browsers a slice?
(And yes, we’re aware of the clamor for a print style sheet. More on this later.)
Update: Marten Veldthuis from Strongpsace points out that 37signals ran into a very similar problem in Backpack. Details can be found in Jamis Buck’s June 3rd post ie-is-teh-3v1l. Spread the word: “tags” is effectively a reserved keyword, even though no such concept exists in (X)HTML. Use it at your (users’) peril.
