Don't Call it a Banner
July 26, 2006
Here's something that was plaguing me for months: I couldn't figure out why my header image wasn't showing up in Safari on all my macs - it looked fine in Firefox for mac or any PC browser for that matter. Even other macs seemed to deal with it fine... it was just all the macs that I owned with the problem. I figured something was messing with a user-stylesheet that was overriding id="header" so that it was display:none; but I couldn't figure out where it was. I saw it on a number of other pages that used id="header" but I quickly forgot about it since I was the only one seeing the issue and I was neglecting my blog anyways. Finally something clicked today when I was looking at the new TypePad homepage today (which looks awesome), it was id="banner", often effectively the same as id="header" on default MT/TP templates unless you're doing special things with your header content, that wasn't showing up. Long-webbed gears started turning as I realized that "banner" is a common word used to describe advertising formats. Saft, a really useful Safari plugin, has a feature called "URL Match Pattern" under the "Ad Blocker" tab which was horribly misnamed as it was also display:hidden;ing anything with the id of "banner." I'll remove the id from my template eventually but removing the "banner" rule from my personal Saft install at least fixes my problem.