Web Development Log

I had a friend call and ask me to look at a page.  The problem was, neither the <b> tag, nor the <strong> tag were having any effect in multiple browsers.

I looked at the code, it looked well-formed.  I ran it through a validator and it had some minor problems, but nothing I could relate to the mysterious 'bold not working' problem.  I tried an Internet search but couldn't actually find any related articles. And that's why I'm writing this.

When I studied the bold text in Chrome's developer tools (SHIFT-CNTRL-I in Chrome, I like better than Firebug, which also rocks), I notice that Chrome had applied a style (font-weight:bolder) I had never heard of, and the computed weight was 300.

The culprit was a body styling: font-weight:100.  All Chrome was doing for the bold and strong tag was adding 200, making the bold weight 300 -- not enough!.  Changing the body style to font-weight:normal; fixed the problem.

The problem here was very straight-forward: a number of articles/pages on a Joomla website needed to display the contact information for a single "role" (name/title/phonenumber).  We needed one place to manage that data, and the Joomla "Contacts" seemed the logical choice.  I had set out to write a plugin, but in doing the research I found this problem had already been solved.

Imagine *perfect* concentric circles, with the most limited class in the center.  Each next level can do *everything* previous levels can do.

The question has come up twice since I've been working with PHP and Joomla (which for the latter, is not so long!): can I publish SharePoint content on my PHP website?  The answer is yes.