I’m currently working with some other developers creating a PHP / SQL Server 2005 based site.  The division of work is along the lines of I do PHP and SQL, and they take my less than beautiful code and pretty it up.  This has worked very well, and because I tend to run IE6 on my desktop and they run Firefox, we catch a lot of browser bugs between us.

Yesterdy a form I’ve developed was ‘made over’ and etsted in Firefox – all seemed well.  Today I loaded it on my PC and ran it under IE6 – the page wouldn’t load properly, there were Javascript bugs being reported with error messages like ‘Unknown Runtime Error’ and other such nonsense.

The page concerned was a hairy piece of work using AJAX in conjunction with PHP to load parts of a data entry form as required, so as we’d made changes to both CSS and Javascript, as well as re-structured a few area of the page, we thought we’d soemhow managed to break the more complicated stuff, and that IE was being antsy over something that was , at heart, OK.

Well, there’s an old saying that states that ‘Assumption makes an Ass of U and Me’, and to cut  along story short I’m afraid that that was exactly took place.  A couple of hours going through the code with a fine tooth comb revealed it to be fairly simple – we’d got <FORM> tags within another form, and whilst Firefox was OK with this, IE wasn’t and had a hissy fit.  Which meant that, gulp, FF was wrong and IE was, after a fashion, right.

I need a lie down in a quiet room…fortunately the nested tags were an oversight and on removal the situation was resolved.  Definitely one for the notebook, though.