IE7 sometimes shows ordered lists as a series of ones (instead of incrementing the li element count). This test battery explore the various cases, but the one that did the trick for this particular case was giving the li element display: list-item.

I did some quick googling how to use PHP to hook up with Exchange:

• Outlook Web Access (Exchange) with PHP and cURL
• Talking SOAP With Exchange
• Tyler Hall’s code to mess around with OWA
• PHP WebDAV extension 1.1 description
• Best way to access Exchange using PHP?

When an absolutely positioned element is adjacent in the source to a floated element, IE7 can sometimes “disappear” the absolutely positioned element. Debugging this with the Developer Toolbar is tricky, as nearly any hasPosition-triggering change will cause the element to reappear — but the same change to the CSS won’t actually fix the problem.

To fix, check out this test battery (the fixes are in tests six and onwards).

I’m used to dealing with bugs in legacy browsers, just not ones in Firefox. A strange bug in some releases of FF2 causes the cursor to disappear in text fields and textareas. A general fix was to specify overflow: auto for the fields. However, in some stubborn cases (inside the div-complexity of a modal box), this didn’t help.

I ended up using Jquery to inject a wrapper and some CSS to fix the issue.

If you have problems with non-UTF-8 characters breaking your feeds in Wordpress (ie. breaking XML parsers), one solution is to attach a filter to the the_excerpt_rss() function and stripping or converting the characters. I’m guessing the errant off-character characters (ahem) are the result of promiscuous copypasting.

1. Grab Jason Judge’s self-contained function for limiting to valid UTF-8 characters (here’s a link to the source).
2. Paste it into your theme’s functions.php file.
3. Also add the following lines:
   
   function the_excerpt_rss_utf8($text) {
return trim(clean_utf8_xml_string($text));
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'the_excerpt_rss_utf8');

I had totally forgotten why I don’t use <button> elements:

1. When using multiple buttons in a form, IE6 and IE7 sends the values of all of them
2. IE6 and IE7 sends the innerHTML as the value of the button (ignoring the value attribute)

If you need a longer explanation, Drew McLellan has written about it.

Today I tried signing up for a Nectar card, a customer loyalty card for Sainbury’s (among other stores). Their site, Nectar.com, is nice looking, and finding where to sign up for a card was nice and easy.

However, my attempt to sign up was thwarted when, on page two, I hit a form asking me a) how many children under 18 I had living in my household (answer: 0) and b) to provide their birthdays (empty text fields). Whatever I entered — and I mean whatever — it wouldn’t let me past the javascript validation complaining about a mismatch between the number of children and their ages. I couldn’t get past it despite an attempt to create an imaginary child to get by it.

Stumped, I gave up. Figuring I’d notify them of the issue, I clicked over to their Contact us page.

But they have only three options of contacting them: chat (which requires you to have a Nectar card number), calling them, and writing them — via snail mail.

No email address or contact form!

Adding insult to injury, their footer promo content for contacting them offers an “Email us” link.