Computers: so f’ing literal-minded!

I just had one of those excruciating episodes that every programmer comes up against every so often. Particularly those of us with less than perfect vision. When one character somewhere in a long file (or possibly worse, a set of files) is missing, incorrect, or just a smidge out of place and because of how perfectly computers adhere to what is in the source file, all the billsaysthis.com pages were not displaying correctly. Finally, just before tearing my hair out, I was going over the styles using a very helpful piece of software called IE Booster and I noticed that all my styles were not listed (IEB has a function called Show Stylesheets). A closer examination of my stylesheet showed me that one style had a closing parenthesis “)” instead of a closing curly brace “}”; that was enough to make Internet Explorer stop reading in the stylesheet and therefore it never got to the styles that were needed for proper display. Argggghhhhh!!!!

By the way, there’s a new version of IEB out that’s even more useful than the version that solved my problem. If you work with web pages, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Thanks Dirk.