I have 88x31px banners on my front page because in this household we love and respect Angelfire. On August 1st, 2021, I added an SVG one:

Best viewed withsomething otherthan Safari

I later added a wrapper with a title attribute, displaying on hover:

please for the love of god any other browser, apple hates my css

This is because while you were partying, I studied the blade was doing shit like this. I don’t “know” CSS, but with only familiarity with Photoshop layers, a commitment to the idea that CSS does make sense to one willing to get one’s head around its concepts, and a spirit of guess and check, I have had a lot of fun. (Y’all here on the website never even saw the colored stuff)

But goddamn, Safari. The dither overlay just layered over the whole page and I couldn’t see why. It worked in Chrome and Firefox and I decided I was just gonna live with that.

Later, I got a Macbook Air. It turns out that while going from $200 Chromebooks to a $500 Chromebook was a luxurious-feeling upgrade, it had nothing on what you get when you spend tech-worker money. I resent this a little – like, I wanted to believe it was all stupid brand hype rich people fell for, but no, this is nice. Anyway, I installed Firefox immediately, but now I had something that could run Safari.

A month-ish ago, I made a little Jekyll dooblidoo to automate the dither HTML markup and then later went to make it a post layout, and felt embarrassed to have it be broken on, you know, one of the major browsers, so with my shiny new hardware I could make another stab at it.

In the process I did find some reference to stacking contexts and cross-browser differences, but again, I don’t know CSS so this was not majorly enlightening–I ended up with a mental theory that involved it being important that there were pseudo elements…?

With enough guess and check, I figured out that I could switch a couple position: fixed to position: absolute, add a couple of position: relative, bada bing bada boom, effect maintained, now Safari doesn’t look so mad1. So this fixed my automated dooblidoo, but those old blog posts were still hella broken. Eh, it’s more authentic to just leave them, who cares.

you guys, someone cared.

I cannot express to you how mind-blowing this is to me. It feels like it’s never a compiler bug until it is, but also more like someone found a compiler bug by watching my small and fluffy dog while she played with her toy squirrel?? 😮😮😮😮

If this gets merged I’m gonna be so psyched. It is arguably already a pretty sweaty proposition to have noticed bugs.webkit.org in a referer header and then Post about it, but believe me, more psychedness is possible. My alt text “selfie where i have super good hair” in an actual-ass browser engine’s code’s history. He he he…

I’m taking down my whiny Safari banner and I promise that from now on I will check Safari compatibility at least as often as I check Lynx readability, which is more than you would assume from reasonable priors.

  1. if it’s still broken on older versions please don’t tell me I don’t want to know ↩