HTML 5

Bit of a slog at work today, a client called up saying that no-one with Google Chrome could get to the payment page of their website. I'm dying for HTML 5 to become the de facto standard but haven't had the chance to study too much of it apart from the fancy graphic stuff and it turns out that the code on our old sites hacks form validation by setting a required attribute on each form element to either true or false and processing it on the server somehow. In HTML 5 however this attribute is used for in the browser validation and rather than being true or false it is either present and true or absent and false, hence Chrome is interpreting all fields on the forms as being required.

To cut a longish (3 hours of trawling t'interweb) story short you have to add a corresponding novalidate attribute to the form in order to switch the browser validation off. This then took some developers many more hours in some C# files trying to find the source code that renders the forms so that they could add the novalidate attribute (I am yet to see what the advantage of all this .NET stuff is, so far it just seems to make every second of every day very, very complicated).

I came home late and weary and drank some beer (and cider, oh and wine) whilst watching Spain (my sweepstake team) run rings around Germany yet somehow only manage to win by one goal. I am now guaranteed £10 for my £1 stake.

By the time Jen called around 10:30pm I was little help comforting her, but I tried my best to be sympathetic. She had to take her Dad all the way into the radiotherapy herself today and it was rather emotionally tiring from what I gather.