revjim.net

So now I'm fed up. Really fed up. So I pull out wget tell it to grab her page and save it to disk and then I tell Phoenix to load the page from that file. It loads!

But, since she has relative URLs in her design, the style sheet isn't there and neither are the images. So I edit the file to point to the aboslute locations of those files. Now Phoenix crashes. Okay, okay. We're getting somewhere.

Being the smart cookie that I am, I leave the absolute reference to the image at the top of the page , and change the style sheet link back to be a relative reference that points to a non-existant file. It works. But, without any CSS, of course. I think you see where this is going next.

I change the external image reference back to a relative reference that points to a non-existant file, and I then point the style sheet link back to her style sheet on her server. It crashes!

I copy her stylesheet from her server to a local file on my system. Then I change the external reference to the style sheet to be a relative reference which, since I've copied her style sheet on to my system, now exists and is the same as the one her server servers. It crashes!

Okay. Now I know. It's the style sheet that's doing it. Not the network. Not the server. Not the graphics. Not the XHTML. Just the style sheet.

I look for errors in the style-sheet: there aren't any.

I make the style sheet nothing but an empty file: It works.

I add back in the body section: It hangs.

I leave only the body section, but remove the "letter-spacing" setting: It works.

I replace her entire style sheet and remove only the "letter-spacing" setting from body: It works!!!

I put "letter-spacing" back, just to make sure I'm not crazy: IT CRASHES!!!

Now I want to be REALLY sure, so I load another page that uses CSS and "letter-spacing". I choose Eric Meyer's CSS2 test page for letter-spacing: it CRASHES!

This is good… and bad. It's good because I figured out what is causing the problem. It's bad because, the exact reason is unknown.

It's not JUST Mozilla, or everyone would be having a problem. And it isn't JUST Linux, or else Opera would be having trouble. Obviously Mozilla is part of the problem. However, it may be Mozilla coupled with my TrueType libraries. It might be Mozilla and my use of XFT. It might be Debian's version of Mozilla.

Based on the fact that it is happening with two DIFFERENT default fonts, and from two different pages with different fonts being requested by them, I can rule out font choice for now. Also, we can rule out Mozilla alone as the problem. So, it's either my XFT support that's doing it, or it's Debian's Mozilla.

I'll test that idea later. It's time to go home.