Despite having some professional capacity as a web developer, I rarely view LT in Internet Explorer. I don’t use it as my day-to-day browser, though I’ve been enjoying IE 7 in the Vista beta.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that my sidebar was being completely disregarded and thrown to the bottom of the heap, so to speak, appearing at the very bottom of the page. While being bad for usability and convenience, this is also bad for what meager ad-click-throughs LT pulls through. Plus, it just looks off.

I thought there was perhaps an errant unordered list, left unclosed. Something that Firefox was able to handle, but at which IE was failing. Of course, all of my developer tools exist within Firefox, so elements used to outline blocking elements and identify parts of the page weren’t available in the browser with which the site was having troubles. Chagrin.

What’s worse, the problem wasn’t appearing on single-entry pages. Great. Nothing like an inconsistent, difficult to track down problem. I finally pulled the source code into Dreamweaver (since my primary IDE isn’t WSYIWYG, Zend represent!) to see if perhaps the problem would manifest there. No such luck.

Pulling the single-paged sidebar and the main-page sidebar into my compare and merge program also showed no differences. The mystery was deepening, in a way.

I began to actually look objectively at the point of failure, and realized that the comments link wasn’t being displayed—just the image. I tracked down the comments link, and sure enough, the last entry being displayed was the ‘Threadless has a “Lite” week entry. And there it was. The double quotes in the title were being reproduced in the link’s “title” attribute. And they weren’t properly escaped. So Internet Explorer saw that the title attribute in the link had stopped being declared, and saw random text in the “body” of the tag. Which happened to include another set of quotes, still. Errant quotes around non-existing tag attributes, it would seem, give rise to panic in the IE world. So IE stopped displaying a good, healthy chunk of HTML, until it could find a piece to close it out of that link. It just happened to skip the

and other structural tags along the way.

Firefox, on the other hand, was smart enough to figure out what happened.

I’m really not sure whose “fault” this is, except to say that I think Word Press should be cleansing entry titles before spitting them into link titles. That’s just good common sense. Still, IE’s handling of the issue was obnoxious and destructive. And what’s worse is that, in a few days, that entry would have been bumped from the main page, and I would have never noticed the problem again. Problems that go away on their own are usually the worst kind, simply because they haven’t been fully resolved. It’s like they’re in remission.

Such is the life of a web developer. I know this has been ridiculously long, but I thought I’d show you the lengths one must occasionally go to for just a tiny, bizarre-scenario issue.