This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

Too Soon…

Over 200 people have died as a result of the storm that caused the sinkhole in your image.

But hey, at least you got some LOLs out of it!

Tasteless.

Now that is just wrong. I have an uncle that lost a pet goat in this tragedy.

Nice.

I had stopped laughing at IE recently when I realized that I had been coding wrong all along. Like your products and this blog right here, I used to declare my code in XHTML Transitional.

I spent a couple days correcting all my CSS to XHTML Strict, and now I don’t need to code a special CSS for IE anymore, and things align correctly. IE7 , IE8 and IE9 all renders correctly.

Of course, when it comes to Javascript, it’s another laughing matter… If anyone knows how to debug JS in IE without a bunch of incomprehensible errors, let me know.

So spread the word.

Death is a hoot!

Spent a good portion of this morning dealing with the rare “IE doesn’t display background images in certain elements if it doesn’t feel like it” bug – so this rings true for me.

I had to fix it in three places three different ways.

I’m sure there are lots of great, talented people on the IE team, but sometimes I think it would be hard to be friendly to them if I ever met them in person. They’d better nail IE9 .

@Pak – your CSS must be remarkably simple.

Things like padding, position, margin and png transparency is what gives me heck in IE. Whether I use XHTML Transitional, Strict, it’s the same issues really.

@Pak-Kei—“correcting all my CSS to XHTML Strict”

O_O

@Pak-Kei Either I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say or you just have found the strangest way to use CSS styles. I am convinced xhtml/html and css are two different things, but then again maybe I’m in error here.

This is what I generally use.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en#Overview

It is not great but most of the times this is helpful

Happy Debugging

Too bad no one of 37s feels obliged to respond to the comments that point to this post being wrong.

It’s one thing to bash IE or even use strong visual depictions of your feelings internally. It’s an entirely different story to post it on your website.

Sam, Ryan, Jason: While I see your point, didn’t you anticipate the reactions?

Why so serious? Nobody has been killed or injured due to that sinkhole. Yet. Give it time.

Wow. SvN used to be one of my favorite blogs – it was continually inspirational. Now it seems you save the inspirational stuff for the books (which are great).

Meanwhile, the blog alternates between boring and incredibly offensive…

Thank you for the Wednesday morning laugh… now as to your commenters:

My grandmother was horribly offended then killed by people who take things way too seriously and complain about it pseudo anonymously.

Wait, that’s ridiculous…

@most of these commenters: Stop throwing stones from your glass house, unless you’ve never laughed at a joke that offended anyone in any way.

When I saw this post, I laughed and then sent my husband the link. He laughed too.

You don’t have a right to NOT be offended…

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2246-no-one-has-the-right-to-spend-their-life

@Adam Sentz I have no idea if my CSS is remarkably simple, or remarkably wrong all along, since I have been coding in vacuum most of the time. You can check out my Tumblr in case you are wondering. Since I don’t use em as the unit much, that might be the difference.

@Roy Yes, HTML , XHTML and CSS are all different things. What I simply meant is, turning on Strict Mode for IE by declaring your file as XHTML Strict (and correcting all my CSS errors along the way since I had been coding wrong in Quirks mode for so long) eliminates most problems of CSS in IE.

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html

It’s strange but true, and that’s my discovery.

I just verified it but taking the first line of my blog out: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ”-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1 .0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”> and the whole site falls apart in IE.

@Alison: Of course. With certain people I can joke about pretty much everything, because we know that we are joking. I view this as a typical inside-joke that shouldn’t have been posted here – but that is my opinion.

37signals are absolutely free to post whatever they want. It’s their blog. I just don’t see the added value.

I’m guessing that photo is of the Chicago Spire’s foundation hole taken from the Cite restaurant…Am I right?

Gotta love the haterade over a photograph.

@Allison: It’s not about laughing at jokes in general. It’s about offending people by going public with those jokes.

Analogy: Be racist all you want in private, but if you are a racist while I’m listening to you, I’ll feel embarrassed and it’s highly likely I might say something to you about it.

That’s what people did here (Note: I don’t mean to imply the post itself has anything to do with racism).

@Berserk and André: That is a good point, and I hadn’t thought of it that way. I agree with both of you.

Like you said, Berserk, they can post whatever they want on their blog… and I think that is the point that drove me to post such a passionate (and impulsive, and unprofessional) reply. People can do whatever they want on their blogs, and it’s up to the reader whether to continue reading that blog or not.

is that a real whole? Kind Regards, Pinetop Cabin Rentals

The Joke was funny, what is happening here in Guatemala is not. I’m really not against someone making a joke out of this, I believe that is the human mind, just like when we laugh at a kid who fell down. Now the question is will you just laugh at the kid and let him stay there crying or will you go out and help him?

Guys our country has been very affected, to a point you don’t imagine, lots of people lost their crops, their houses. It’s not about how many dead people to pay attention to this. People are really suffering! All of this just to say…if any of you can find a way to help, sending cloths, food, come here and give a hand for a week, we will appreciate it a lot!

Keep the good posts Jason!

By the way the sinkhole you see there, happened in 2007, but if you want to see the pictures of the one that happend a few weeks ago you can find some here: http://bit.ly/bjCfrB