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“Why is IE not using some of the styles we’ve put on our body tag?”

It might be because older versions of IE don’t properly support CSS selectors which use more than one class. Even newer IE versions retain this behavior in quirks mode (since that’s the point of quirks mode), so make sure your doctype is correct. Stack Overflow has more info.

Interesting Things

• In Ruby, private and protected may not mean what you think they mean.

  • private methods cannot be called with an explicit receiver. This is Ruby’s way of ensuring that they are only called on self, which is the implicit receiver. This leads a surprising result: you can’t call self.a_private_method, because it has an explicit receiver. Just call a_private_method instead.

    If you’re used to Java or C#, you might be surprised to know that subclasses can call their superclasses’ private methods (and vice versa). That may seems strange, since in Java that’s called protected. But…

  • protected methods in Ruby have a very different restriction: they can only be called from objects of the same class. Your humble reporter has never encountered a use for this kind of method, but there it is.

  Of course, any method can be called on any object using #send. We’re adults after all. We can make our own smart choices.

• Jon Berger points us to a couple of great Ruby podcasts:

  • Ruby Rogues is a roundtable discussion featuring a number of the great contributors in the community. (iTunes)

  • The Ruby Show, hosted by Peter Cooper and Jason Seifer, covers news from across the Ruby and Rails world, including the latest gems and helpful blog posts. (iTunes)