I was looking for some IE developer tools (because they generally suck) and came across this at the Microsoft site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc848894(VS.85).aspx

Wow, that doesn’t look like Firebug or anything does it??   And it won’t even work on IE7.  Sigh.  Trying to troubleshoot css/javascript issues on IE makes me hate web development so hopefully this will make ie8 at least somewhat bearable but that doesnt’ help trying to fix things on IE6 and IE7 which are still a majority of the traffic I server (luckily this ratio is dropping steadily however).

Hopefully some of you are coming to this page from the daily Java.Blogs update e-mail that shows up in your inbox every night.  And maybe someone that maintains the site will see this and figure out why this bug happens.

On entries where the name of the blog is a domain name (i.e. dzone.com) the anchor tag terminator for the link to the blog entry does not terminate at the end of the link but rather it continues to consume the domain name of the blog as well which means the only way to get to the link is to copy paste it into my browser window.  Annoying!

Basically you get something like this:

<a href=”http://www.javablogs.com/Jump.action?id=123456″>http://www.javablogs.com/Jump.<wbr>action?id=123456<br>dzone.com</a&gt;

when you really should get the </a> tag after the ID number and not the domain name.  Like I said, though, it’s fine if the blog’s name is not a domain name.  Can one of you guys fix this??  🙂

Also, when looking at the source for this problem I came across the <wbr> tag.  I spend a lot of time on the front end these days I can honestly say I’ve never seen that tag before but lo and behold it is real:  http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html.  I guess I learned something new today.

Sending obscure HTML in an e-mail is probably not the best idea anyways.