Wired News has used Vignette as a content management system for a few years now. Today, we discovered an odd bug that shows up whenever the cache (memory) was flushed (reset). Vignette is automatically inserting one html comment tag right before our DTD. The comment contains a timestamp, which we can only assume is used for internal file management. While this doesn’t appear to invalidate our xhtml under 1.0 transitional rules, it does significantly throw off IE6/Win with font size, margin, padding, and position values. IE6 seemingly ignores the DTD completely, and reverting back to “quirks” mode, and acting as if we never specified XHTML 1.0 Transistional. It’s mainly of concern to me, not because of the font size issue itself, but because the larger size and margins are causing the left column (often using a black background) to overlap and obscure the content of the center column. The engineers haven’t been able to find a solution to eliminate this comment tag which only shows up at random times. It’s a large enough bug to possibly warrant postponing the redesign until we can get some answers from Vignette.
Earlier Portfolio/database work
Later Foiled