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After fighting HTML comments in Safari and Chrome (see the case study below) I came to an idea to name and catalog workaround patterns in troubleshooting and debugging. The first one is called Hidden Output. Sometimes we can just remove message boxes reporting minor problems and generating unnecessary support calls by hiding their windows, for example, by using CtxHideEx32. A different example is what I did today when troubleshooting Amazon aStore widget HTML code. It worked well in IE8:

However, in Apple Safari and Google Chrome the widget code was visible at the top of the page:
After a few unsuccessful attempts to debug the problem and faced with other pressing tasks I got a flash in my mind to hide the visible code by changing its color to be the same as its background:
<font color=”D3E7F4″><script type=”text/javascript”><!–
amazon_ad_tag=”crasdumpanala-20″;
amazon_ad_width=”728″;
amazon_ad_height=”90″;
amazon_color_background=”D3E7F4″;
amazon_color_border=”0000FF”;
amazon_color_logo=”FFFFFF”;
amazon_color_link=”0000FF”;
amazon_ad_logo=”hide”;
amazon_ad_link_target=”new”;
amazon_ad_border=”hide”;
amazon_ad_title=”OpenTask Books, Magazines and Notebooks”; //–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/asw.js”></script></font>
After that the picture became nicer:

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -
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January 26th, 2010 at 12:46 am
[…] happens when Hidden Output and Frozen Process patterns don’t help with annoying popup windows? The […]