The last time I did that I was 16
After allowing my driver’s license to expire (and finding out about it at a very inopportune time), I found myself preparing to take the state’s written test for drivers-to-be.
You can find South Dakota’s driver’s license manual here. If you view that page in Firefox, you’ll probably see where I ran into trouble. Almost all of the images display as black rectangles. They render fine in IE. I have no idea why this is or how it could happen. I tried downloading one of the images with wget and then viewing it in IE, and it still looked wrong.
To get around this, I rdesktop’d to a windows machine and read the manual from there. I read it right before bed, and I only fell asleep four times while reading it. I passed the test yesterday morning.
Being the web geek that I am, I had to see the black rectangles for myself. Looking at the source, I found the culprit — a bad attribute in the image tags. It uses the VML attribute “v:images” which is not a standard img tag attribute. From what I could find about the attribute, it seems to be one that is used by Word when HTML pages are generated by it from a Word doc. I believe FrontPage uses it somehow as well. Of course, those are both such wonderful HTML editors. Way to go state of South Dakota.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010549981033.aspx
Interesting.
Although about 10-20% of the images were fine in Safari. Makes you wonder what sort of mystical, voodoo conversion rules Word uses.