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For the Developers in the Audience, a Scary Quote

Dave Shea says:

"Did you know that you can nest your divs so deep that Firebug stops working properly? I do now."

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mezzoblue ยง Design Rants

Personally, I'm surprised because I've seen some savagely nested divs produced by systems like Drupal and while it was a singularly awful environment to work in, it didn't actually cause Firebug to choke. Also, looking through his code, I see nothing that screams to me as being exceptionally deeply nested. I put a comment in. I'll update with more info…

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3 Responses to “For the Developers in the Audience, a Scary Quote”

  1. Dave S. Says:

    Of course, now I can't find an instance to call out as an example, but I can describe the symptoms.

    I've also noticed on a few recent projects other than this one that the inspector breaks down for deeply-nested elements. I'm thinking a dozen or so levels deep, something like anchors within list items within uls within list items within a second set of uls within multiple divs etc.

    When using either the 'inspect' button, or clicking on the element in the source listing, the CSS inspector stops showing the calculated style for that element. I generally can get the parent's style in those cases, but some elements just stop reporting properly.

    Wish I could replicate it at the moment, but you've given me something to document next time I run across it.

  2. rob Says:

    Thanks for clarifying. I'll keep my eyes peeled.

    I'm also going to experiment a little bit with some of my sites to see if I can find an example where it breaks.

    Curiosity has me.

  3. Ryan Says:

    Firebug had an issue with displaying anchor styles in Firefox 2.0.0.12 (and it didn't matter how deep they were nested). Thankfully this has been fixed.

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