Jackson’s Blog

I was working on a project that required cross-browser compatibility, this generally means at least FireFox and IE. The reason is due to the fact that IE is still the most commonly used browser (IE7, IE6, etc.), FireFox coming in second, and then the other browsers split up the rest.

I was trying to code the following structure:

<div>

<div/><div/>

</div>

<div>

<div/><div/>

</div>

Except the two inner most divs were floated left, followed by a break which cleared the float. The code rendered perfect in FireFox and IE7, but it didn’t render correctly in IE 6. So I wracked my head on it for a bit, looked up various reasons on why IE 6 might render the code differently, and eventually found a solution. The solution is to make the div’s position relative. This solution is completely counter-intuitive, and frankly, doesn’t make much sense. So the moral of the story is, sometimes the solution for things can be very dumb, but regardless, it’s the solution.

Today’s topic will be the importance of having two environments, one to develop your code in, and one to release into the public. Sometimes it is simply easier to edit, run, and test it in the live environment, but when your code deals with data, this becomes more problematic. Imagine some code that insert data into the database whenever you run it, if you run it in the dev environment, it’s really no big deal, but if you run it in the live environment, it might cause database pollution. Although your code should account for that case anyways, but it’s hard to say that during your “updates” you wouldn’t accident code it so that it starts inserting a bunch of meaningless data into your database. Having two environments will allow you to code and test in whichever way you want without having to worry about the consequences.