Web Browser Woes
Flapping Crane has had an annoying problem when being viewed in Apple’s Safari. Basically, when watching a skit, it would occasionally load the skit twice. Sometimes you could see the skit underneath the other one, a little to the right. Sometimes you couldn’t see it, but you knew it was there, because it plays the audio for both of them, and they’re not in sync. So you get this echo sound.
This seemed to coincide with the move to the new design. But there was no difference in the XHTML for that part. There was also a recent update to Safari. That might explain it. The bug happens so rarely (maybe 5% of the time) that maybe it just didn’t happen before the switch.
The most I could come up with is that it was a problem with the <object> and <embed> tags.
It’s a long story, but because of the old browser wars, we ended up with two ways to put movies into documents. Some browsers supported one, some supported the other. The <object> is the correct way to do it, according to the W3C. But, to cover all the bases, web designers use both. The browser is supposed to pick one and just use that.
So I figured that may be the problem. Unfortunately, when I took the <embed> tag out, it didn’t work in Firefox.
Anyway, I isolated the problem — it was the classid attribute. Taking it out works. So Firefox was ok. But I had to make sure it would work in IE, so I had to insert some dumb comment-style conditionals.
Everything seems to work. But I’m not sure.
See, it happens so rarely in Safari that it’s hard to tell if the change worked. I can’t reliably duplicate the problem. So I really don’t know if the <embed> tag was responsible at all.
And let me tell you, googling for the answer was a bitch. I eventually found this page, which seems to have helped, though the subject of the post isn’t about the Safari problem.
But we’ll see. Eventually.