I found a really interesting (annoying) behavior the other day with the way internet explorer handles cursor styles.
We had just launched the website for a major metropolitan airport, and noticed an astonishing number of 404 requests to a non existent page entitled /somepath/normal .
Searching the code for “normal” only returned a couple of css hits… As it turns out, we had a table with the following code:
<tr onmouseover="this.cursor.style='pointer'"
onmouseout="this.cursor.style='normal'" >
The first thing you may notice about the code above is that there is no css cursor style called ‘normal’, it should be ‘default’ or simply ”.
How would this result in a wackload of webhits you ask? It turns out that when Internet Explorer does not recognize the style name of a cursor style, it assumes that you are providing a url to an image to use.
Therefore, whenever a user waved their mouse over their flight search results on our search page, we had multiple requests sent to the server… one for each row in the table. You can imagine what this would mean for a busy site…