Presentation Layer

Friday, May 15, 2009

JASH - debug safari

Need to debug javascript/css on .. safari? Sure, the thing is coming along in that respect, but its built-in tools and even firebug lite just don't cut it sometimes. Give JASH a go.

(Not sure I'd recommend JASH for ie debugging, since the script debugger / debugbar / ie developer toolbar are a little more convenient)

UPDATE: I've used JASH a little more, and found it useful a little less.

jQuery settles down with dojo, gains weight

Sure, this is months-old news, but still. I remember back in the good ol' days when jQuery was a young, athletic rising star. Then it met dojo and settled down.. and gained weight. Look under the jQuery hood and you'll see .. two libraries blast-welded together, complete with their own separate prenups, er, copyright blocks: jQuery and Sizzle, from the dojo foundation.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Disabled input fires no events

Evidently, a dom node "<input disabled="disabled"/>" will not fire any events, even if you do, say, something as direct as this: "<input disabled="disabled" onclick="alert('clicked it.');"/>"

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

IE JSON silent fail - size limit

Trying to get a ton (600K) of JSON via XHR into IE.. silently failing. Oh, it fetches the data, it just can't parse the data, either through jQuery's built-in JSON parsing or even by the ol' eval.

Trimming the data down to 60K, there were no problems. The data is a repeating set of dummy objects, so I'm almost certain that I didn't just happen to trim out some problem section of the data. I'm convinced that IE is choking on the data simply because it is more than it can handle. My guess is that JScript doesn't throw the usual "your script is taking too long to execute" warning when executing a single "eval".

I 'solved' the problem by ditching XHR and using dynamic script tags:

data.js


namespace.onData({theGigantic:json............});

Saturday, May 2, 2009

ie6 and PNGs

Thanks to a tip from Gena Wilson:

http://www.dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_belatedPNG/

The cool part: it doesn't use AlphaImageLoader, it uses VML (Microsoft's idea of svg).

How to Avoid CSS Hacks

I've decided to use a very tiny bit of javascript to free me of css hacks. I already use js to add a class "jsEnabled" to the <html> element so that I can style things differently if I know that javascript is going to swoop in and alter them later (tabs, carousels, etc). Taking this a step further, I put the browser name + version number in the html element classname. Then in the css, you can write ".ie7 .my-div {float:none;}" Sure, we're not supposed to rely on javascript. But we usually do. And this is just for minor tweaks anyway. The site will still *work* with js turned off, you'd just lose that tiny css tweak you made that relies on it.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

ie6 + position:fixed nugget

Anyone who hates css expressions .. feel free to leave now, and end up doing the same thing in a more convoluted manner in 'regular' javascript. If it eases your conscience any -- I know it does mine -- this css is sourced in a conditional comment just for ie6


#my-fixed-position-element{
    top:expression(Math.max(document.documentElement.scrollTop + (document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].offsetHeight / 2), 20) + 'px');
}