The Day That Don Melton Debugged My CSS and Maciej Stachowiak Solved the Problem

I feel so guilty for wasting Don Melton’s time today. It all started with his post regarding the switch to Nanoc from WordPress. I admit I have been thinking about switching to a static site generator for years now, but I never could justify spending the time to do so. Anyway, I was teasing Don about his CSS in IE problems…

If you can’t see the embedded tweets below, please consider whitelisting this site. I don’t run any ads, and I don’t collect any information (apart from WordPress’ built-in statistics); I don’t even have Google Analytics.

“Mostly correctly” has always been good enough for IE.

— Wojtek Pietrusiewicz (@morid1n) June 18, 2017

… and then I off-handedly mentioned this one bug, which I have been having with this theme since iOS 6.

Yeah that’s usually the problem. My https://t.co/K5O4zTgB3r theme still has a bug only in mobile Safari which I can’t fix. ?

— Wojtek Pietrusiewicz (@morid1n) June 18, 2017

It really was just an off-hand comment — I did not expect him to try to debug it. Boy was I wrong… I did try to casually dissuade him from bothering about it…

It’s probably my bloated CSS which I should just rewrite from scratch. I’ll look for an example. Sec.

— Wojtek Pietrusiewicz (@morid1n) June 18, 2017

Since Don was already looking into it, I decided to make a fresh post which would illustrate that this is still an issue. Shockingly, everything worked correctly! Surprised with the result, and extremely pleased that either my CSS or Safari was now working correctly, I decided to make a funny…

Wanted to make a funny. Broke Safari again. ? pic.twitter.com/H51xo41KHL

— Wojtek Pietrusiewicz (@morid1n) June 18, 2017

Well, that wasn’t what I expected. Since the CSS displayed correctly without any HTML tags inside the <p class="notatka"></p>, at that moment I assumed that something was definitely wrong with my CSS.

At this point, Don had already spent at least an hour trying to help me out. I really felt bad, so I had no choice but to promise a peace offering.

Thanks for your time Don, especially since you’re retired and have better things to do. I owe you a bottle or two!

— Wojtek Pietrusiewicz (@morid1n) June 18, 2017

And then I realised I interrupted his family life too…

Not that I know of! Thanks, I’ll see what I can do with this.

And now it’s time for me to walk the dog. Apologies.

— Don Melton (@donmelton) June 18, 2017

A few hours later (technically a few minutes ago, as I write these words), Don returned from his walk and was nice enough to send out a plea for help.

Can one of my Safari/WebKit peeps take a look at this for @morid1n? It’s got me stumped. (And we all know how _easy_ that is to do.) https://t.co/FLyONTBweE

— Don Melton (@donmelton) June 18, 2017

Maciej Stachowiak, the head of fucking WebKit, replied…

According to info in the Radar, this is caused by text size adjust, which can be turned off with -webkit-text-size-adjust:none

— othermaciej (@othermaciej) June 18, 2017

I added the property to my CSS, which now looks like this:

#content p.notatka {
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
background: #c40e27;
color: #f0f0f0;
margin-left: -190px;
margin-right: -190px;
padding: 30px 190px;
}

Lo and behold, everything now renders correctly on my iPhone!

P.S. Here’s the radar itself.

Today was another example of one of the things that I love the internet for1 — the ability to communicate with people (celebrity or otherwise) from around the world. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that, through a huge error on my side, Don spent more than an hour trying to help me out. I know he’s retired and spends a lot of his time with a bottle of wine in his hand, but still — this is just shocking. Cool… but shocking.

If you know how I might go about ordering a thank you gift for Don and Maciej over the internet, to have it delivered to an address where they can both (separately) pick said gift up (prefereably without me having to know their home addresses), please let me know. Yes, this is a question mainly directed at Don and Maciej — I’m dead serious.

Cheers guys! You really made my day. And fixed the problem! And I feel guilty for dragging you into this. Now, help me send you booze!

Twitter specifically in this case. I do tend to treat is more like the “open web” despite it technically being a closed ecosystem for a while now, but at least they’re not even close to what Facebook is trying to do. ↩