Banner
any day today rss X

News and Comment June 2018

Index: 2018201920202021202220232024

27 June (Part 2) - Help please

This is how one reader’s web browser displayed yesterday’s blog. It is the third similar report within the past 48 hours so not easily dismissed. Naturally the new Bonkers’ site is blamed but the standard ‘postage stamp’ images have always been a feature of the website and the code that underlies them has not changed much since then.

It has always included the instruction (known as float) to flow text around the image, if it didn't the image would interrupt the text flow and it would sit above the text and not as shown here. To achieve that deliberately would require a lot of more complex code. The Bexley Council is Bonkers overlay of the banner image uses it, nothing else does.

Text flow around (float) is something that can be either switched on or switched off. Obviously it is switched on because it needs to be. There are no other options. There is no obvious way of coding things wrongly and in any case nothing has been changed.
Blog
Way back in 2009 the images of this type were defined as picture type 1 or p1 for short and the definition of p1 has changed only in one respect since then. Before May 2018 the images were displayed at a fixed 233x155 pixels and since then they are displayed at 24% of the browser window width. The latter allows them to grow or shrink as required.

There is only one instruction p1 which is applied right across the site. It must either work all the time or none of the time but three reports say otherwise.

All my computers and browsers display the images correctly as do those of family and friends, see below. I cannot change anything because the float command is obviously required, so what is going on?

It is not impossible that a browser or operating system upgrade has screwed something up but not likely.

One thing occurs to me. Before May 2018 p1 style images not only had a fixed 233x155 pixel size (scaled in Photoshop) but also a larger version which popped up when clicked. Since May only the large version exists and the browser scales it to fit the blog page. When it is clicked the same image is referenced and displayed at a larger size. The code that does the job is common open source, not mine. Maybe some browsers don’t like images that reference themselves. If that is the case, affected readers will not see the problem in old blogs, neither will they see the problem on newer blogs which do not reference a larger image.

There are not many of those but 5th May contains one and so does 24th June.

If anyone spots a pattern I would be pleased to hear about it. Is it only some browsers at some image sizes or only images that expand on click which are affected?
Blog

 

Return to the top of this page
Bonkers is a cookie free zone. Not a single one