{"id":200,"date":"2006-03-01T16:43:43","date_gmt":"2006-03-01T05:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/03\/01\/200\/"},"modified":"2006-03-01T16:55:55","modified_gmt":"2006-03-01T05:55:55","slug":"hidden-text-hidden-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/03\/01\/hidden-text-hidden-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Hidden Text, Hidden Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I have been stupid enough to make a mistake, and then smart enough to realise it, I try<\/em> to be even smarter. I try to learn from the mistake so I don’t make it again. Better still, I don’t want to make that class<\/em> of mistakes again.<\/p>\n

I made a mistake at work late last week, and I am still scratching my head trying to decipher what the lesson might be. I can’t see one. I am posting it here either so others can provide me guidance, or at the very least so it can stand as a warning for others.<\/p>\n

I have no wish to involve my employer in this blog in any way, so the story has been “fictionalised”, which is a polite way of saying that I have lied about the details.<\/div>\n

The War Story<\/h4>\n

A customer visited our web-site, and received some status about his account. He was confused by it, and decided to email our help desk. He included a screenshot of the page, so that his complaint was clear. Rather than take a screenshot, he elected to pasted the rendered HTML page into a Word document. (I have no complaints about the customer. He needed help, and he requested it in an intelligent way.)<\/p>\n

The first tier of the Help Desk looked at the page, and were confused by it. They could not figure out the error. They escalated the problem, including a copy of the Word document. (I have no complaints about the Help Desk. They couldn’t figure out the problem, and rather than make the problem worse, they escalated it in an intelligent way.)<\/p>\n

And so it went, escalating through a number of tiers until it hit my desk. (Again, all intelligently following the support process.)<\/p>\n

The next part gets technical. I was unaware that the web-site uses a common trick. The HTML sent to the browser includes the text of an error message. However, through Javascript magic, it is hidden. The text included in the HTML but is not displayed on the screen. If the right circumstances occur, the Javascript makes the text appear, in bright red, without having to re-load the page. (I have no complaints about the way the web-developers wrote this. It is an intelligent way to solve a real issue.)<\/p>\n

I opened up the Word document, which contained a copy of the web-site page. Inside this page was the error message, which was not relevant to this particular customer’s situation: it was marked as hidden, and was not visible…. except on my machine, where, for reasons I can’t adequately explain, I had Word configured to display hidden text by default. <\/p>\n

So picture it from my perspective. I have an request to explain what a message means, and I open up the attached Word document, and there is a bright red error message. “Aha!” I think, and I proceed to confidently explain to everyone on the support chain what the situation is, and what my recommendations are to resolve the problem. I was more than happy that I could resolve this customer’s concern – all based on a completely incorrect view of what the customer was seeing.<\/p>\n

Hilarity ensued.<\/p>\n

I have since completed my red-faced apologies. I have raised a request to the web team to make a small change to the web-site that I think will prevent other users from suffering from the initial confusion. However, I don’t feel that I have learnt my lesson. I can foresee the same scenario happening again.<\/p>\n

What can I do to stop me (and you!) from making a similar mistake again?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I made a mistake at work late last week, and I am still scratching my head trying to decipher what the lesson might be. I can’t see one. I am posting it here either so others can provide me guidance, or at the very least so it can stand as a warning for others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,31,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-geek","category-heroic-failures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}