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While a forced reload does not always clear the problem, I have found that a font size change will always make it look correct. Hope they figure it out sooner rather than later.

# posted by Anonymous 4:57 AM

Actually, I visit a *lot* of websites - generally, 40 or 50 off of the Daily Rotation site - every day, and the *only* one this has happened to me on is - yep - Alice and Bills site.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining, just adding my .02 clad coins worth (you did ask for it)...

So, it appears to be a specific bug that only shows up on sites that employ whatever code exhibits it, and Alice and Bill's is one of them.

If I were a coder, I'd try to nail it, but alas, I'm just a lowly peon...

# posted by Charles 5:01 AM

I second Charles' comment -- A&B is the only site on which I've seen this bug manifest itself, and a reload takes care of the problem. The bug also presents a contrast: compared to pure gibberish, A&B are fantastic!

# posted by Scott 5:36 AM

I was hoping that A&B or someone had found a workaround to this. Reloading isn't working for me a lot of the time. I have resorted to holding my nose and using IE a couple of times, but that can't be the solution for me as I am not on Windows much other than to play games. Guess I'll complain over @ Blogger.com next.

R.D. Foster

# posted by Anonymous 5:44 AM

My observations:

Take a look at the sidebar advertisements ... I've had three black screens this morning, all occured just before or just after the PC Magazine link at the top-right side of the page.

I've also found that by clearing my browser cache, I can (sometimes) increase the frequency of this error ... which may also point to the relatively static portions of the rendered page.

# posted by Rick 6:33 AM

I took a look at the html source of one page. I'm not sure what I'm looking at, but ANYTHING in red usually catches my attention. Note the first occurance of " nbsp; " in red is the approximate location of the gibberish ... looks like an unknown instruction to Mozilla.

I tried to attach what I saw ... but all the HTML tags caused errors (probably a good thing because the page description is a bit long).

How I found it ... go to any background-only area of the page and right click. Select View Page Source, and you'll get the entire page in HTML code format. Look for any text in red. The rest is pretty simple ... figure out what is supposed to be there and fix it! :)

HTH

Rick

# posted by Rick 6:48 AM

It really rather simple - your HTML code is hosed and Mozilla, which holds HTML to be standards compliant, refuses to gloss over your errors. IE is much more forgiving, and will attempt to render the page correctly, which is what it is doing.

Check out this HTML validator for this page and it will show you what is happening.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aliceandbill.com%2F2004%2F12%2Fits-official-moz-hosed.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=%28detect+automatically%29

Thanks,
Don Mynack

# posted by Anonymous 8:16 AM

I have to agree with those who think it's the site -- I just logged on to A&B and amazingly everything came up okay -- then I tried the comments, gagged, loaded martian. Took 4 tries to get here.

A&B is the only blogger site I can count on to give me gibberisgh in moz.

degustibus14@yahoo.com

# posted by Anonymous 8:28 AM

A&B is better than gibberish...

A&B is the site I can count on to give me gibberish...

Stunning, stunning raves....

# posted by Bill 8:38 AM

I'm just going to add another "it only happens when I visit Alice and Bill.com" post...

# posted by Anonymous 10:00 AM

I really think there are two problems here - one is gzip, which you COULD disable on your webserver. Of course, if you did that, you'd use a LOT more bandwidth than you do now, and pageloads would be a lot slower. This is generally a bad option. You should acknolodge that the problem is NOT with Mozilla however - this is a known issue with gzip.

Second, fix your broken XHTML. You're pages are no where near close to compliant as was mentioned previously - the validator would give a lot less errors if you just called it HTML 4.0, which it much more closely resembles. Bad code WILL cause browser problems - and the fact that it works on IE doesn't excuse bad code. You should be greatful that tools like Mozilla exist that can help you to debug bad code.

I'm really disapointed in this article. It would be one thing if you'd actually done some research rather than just letting Blogger lead you by the nose.

# posted by LRSE Hosting 10:53 AM

I'm sorry if you're disappointed, but all I did was repeat, verbatim, what the folk at Blogger have said. I don't think more research than that is necessary given the situation.

Are there problems with the Blogger template? Damn well better believe it. If you're not careful about things, it'll throw all sorts of crazy HTML codes in all sorts of crazy places. And that's from me, who knows enough about HTML to half-fill a thimble.

The telling fact, however, is that it works fine with IE which, like it or not, the vast majority of the world is using. It would seem, from that point of view, that the onus is on Mozilla products to be compliant, not the other way around. Good software would protect itself from problems.

Then again, you folk with FireFox are the new pioneers. Better start expecting to get your shirts filled with arrows. And if all it takes is a few non-blanking space (nbsp) codes, you'be better expect a lot of arrows.

# posted by Bill 11:13 AM

I'm getting desperate here. Bill and I are not coders, and are certainly not up on the intricacies of XHTML tags and conventions. We are trying our best to muddle through with our free interns (who did a great job building our reviews database) but a lot of this stuff is just out of our realm and we need help. I tried going line by line but the validator rejected half the blogger tags which essentially breaks everything in our template. The fonts got destroyed so I just went back to the original. I also threw in the doc type but I think that made it worse.

We are in danger of screwing this up. Is there anyone who can look at our code and help us? It is embarassing to even ask, but I don't know what else to do. The site worked fine on Firefox until I went to 1.0. We hate IE and want to make this work, but are stumped.

# posted by Alice 11:15 AM

Don, I have to question the validity of the validator based on the universe of web pages. Certainly, Firefox's web page is 100% compliant (who wants to have a problem with Firefox there), but eBay, PC Magazine, Dell, Computer Shopper, NewEgg, SciFi Channel, (more) don't pass muster according to it.

Again, I need to reiterate that IE works perfectly well EVERYWHERE. Apparently it does know how to protect itself. FireFox (and my own beloved Netscape) need to rise to that standard.

# posted by Bill 11:36 AM

BILL:

For the love of God, please stop talking about IE like it is in anyway a benchmark, or standard. IE is worse than garbage, it's practically biohazardous. IE lets in most of the really bad malware and viruses, and has been responsible for bad things like Melissa and Nimda doing so much damage. Just because it "works" (debatable) on IE doesn't make IE in any way good. The simple fact is that IE, like almost all software from Microsoft, is written with the philosophy of 'Embrace and Extend' (more correctly called 'Grab hold of and Kill') which means that by default, it is NOT standards compliant. Yes, MANY sites are not standards compliant. I hate to sound like my own mother, but if sites == friends, and a million of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow? I have ALWAYS believed you to be a LOT smarter than that. Also, while a realize that Blogging != journalism, I think many people do expect more from you and Alice. One of those basic things would be doing research rather than being a parrot. Sorry, I don't really mean to sound harsh, and in fact I apologize if I do - it's not my intent - I just want to be clear.

Alice:

There are several good sites out there that can help you with [D/X]HTML. If you don't have time to mess with it (which is understandable) I'm sure that more than a few people would be willing to help out. I know I am.

# posted by LRSE Hosting 12:03 PM

Don't worry about harsh, passion always sounds that way. But look at what you're telling me... As a Journalist, I must be able to fly to Ohio and run a printing press. As a Journalist, although the vast majority of my audience reads American English, I have to write in British English...

I will grant you that IE and Outlook are as secure a hooker's knickers, but it IS the standard, whether that thought sends you screaming and running into the halls or not. How it got to be that way is irrelevant.

And as I've said before, I haven't used IE -ever, not from version 1.0 nor now. I'm a Netscape person. But you can't fault a winning horse just because it's mother was a jackass.

# posted by Bill 12:23 PM

BTW: It's "<>".

# posted by Bill 12:25 PM

Remove the meta tag in the head section for "http-equiv" and the problem should be "fixed".

You can see discussion/arguments of this issue at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241085

Regardless of who is "at fault", I have found that removing the meta tag does resolve the issue.

-- Phillup

# posted by Anonymous 4:27 PM

That meta-tag is in this post's permalink version, in every post's permalink version, but it's not in the template code itself.

# posted by Bill 5:30 PM

"Here I come to save the dayyyy.... Mighty Mouse is on the wayyyy"

All you boohooers out there just stop. A SMART person would see that sweet, kind, sexy Alice and oh ya the other one < Bill > are trying to let us know about a problem. The quick fix is one I have been doing for awile now and you don't see me kavetching about it do you? It will be fixed in due time so give them a break, better yet give them money so they can PAY somebody to do it faster. Sorry A&B not this week.

Keep up the good work that you are doing.

"Meats Meat and mans gatta eat" Motel Hell

# posted by JD 6:24 PM

I love you, JD.....

# posted by Bill 6:38 PM

JD is my hero!

# posted by Alice 9:43 PM

Well it looks like I made a few folks out there stop and think or I just plain pissed them off. Anywho:

Alice I am honored to be your hero.

Bill..back off man.;)

# posted by JD 5:12 PM

Mozilla is not hosed, keep the FUD to yourself. Any browser is susceptible to this bug.

# posted by Anonymous 11:59 AM

Ive been seeing errors at a lot of websites using FireFox, including the FireFox site itself.

But what do you expect from a 1.0? Especially one thats made almost from scratch? Dunno about the other Mozilla varients out there, but this one is new and a few problems are to be expected.

And quit bashing Alice and Bill...

# posted by Elexorien 6:27 PM