Musings

Disappearing Content

<rant>

I just happened to fire up IE 5.2 (MacOSX), and looked at this web site. The GIF image of the Asymmetry Data from BELLE in this post was simply missing! Here’s the offending code:

<div style="text-align:center;overflow:auto;margin-bottom:20px;">
  <img src="/~distler/blog/images/asym-highr-wsm.gif"
       title="http://www.kek.jp/press/2003/image/asym-highr-wsm.gif"
       style="border:0;width:567px;height:420px;"
       alt="Asymmetry data in B to phi K_S from BELLE" /><br />
<span class="figurecaption">Asymmetry data from BELLE, from which the value of
 <math xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML'>
  <mo lspace="0em" rspace="thinmathspace">sin</mo>
  <mo>(</mo><mn>2</mn><msub><mi>&phi;</mi> <mn>1</mn></msub><mo>)</mo>
 </math>
is determined, plotted as a function of the decay time. The
smooth dotted curve indicates what one would expect from the
Standard Model, whereas the smooth solid curve is a fit to the
observed data.
</span>
</div>

Ignore that IE doesn’t support MathML; many people don’t care about being able to read the formulæ. But not to display the entire <div> because it doesn’t know what to do with overflow:auto?? That’s just brain-dead.

I give up. Life is too short…

Henceforth, InternetExplorer is UNSUPPORTED. If you view these pages in that family of browsers, they may look odd, whole sections may be missing, all sorts of bad stuff may have happened. I don’t know, and I don’t care. And I ain’t gonna “fix” it.

Get yourself a Standards-compliant browser

</rant>

Update (9/5/2003): Having cooled down a bit, I managed to fix this particular problem with IE. But I stand by my “UNSUPPORTED” position, and now have posted a warning for the (mercifully few) IE visitors who frequent this blog.