Industry guru Dave Taylor answers free tech support questions about a wide variety of business and technical topics, including blogging, Google AdSense, MySpace, Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Mp3 players, management, Linux, SEO, Mac OS X, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Microsoft Windows.

My document.all Javascript/CSS code doesn't work?

While going through my book Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML and CSS for a class I was teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I realized that a gremlin crawled into the page proofs and somehow I ended up with IE-specific DOM reference code to show how CSS and Javascript can interrelate, rather than the approved standards-based approach.

Dave's Answer:

The code I have works with Microsoft's Internet Explorer document object model (the DOM is basically the parse tree that holds the layout of the entire Web page being rendered.

Every container, every letter, every style) and, surprisingly, with the new Firefox browser, but doesn't work with Netscape 7.x or Apple's Safari browser.

This is clearly Not A Good Thing.

Fortunately, the fix isn't too difficult at all...

Here's a typical snippet from the book:

<div id="hideme" style="visibility:hidden">
This block of text will be hidden until you click
on the word "display" lower on the page.</div>

Now you'll want to probably <span 
onclick="document.all.hideme.style.visibility='visible'">
display</span> the hidden message too.
This works fine in Internet Explorer, but it really should be using the Javascript getElementByID call rather than a reference to the non-portable "all" document element.

That would change the code thusly: each time you see "all.id" you should instead use "getElementByID("id")":

<div id="hideme" style="visibility:hidden">
This block of text will be hidden until you click
on the word "display" lower on the page.</div>

Now you'll want to probably <span 
onclick="document.getElementByID('hideme').style.visibility='visible'">
display</span> the hidden message too.
I apologize to readers who are a bit confused by this. Fortunately, the fix is straightforward and we'll have it fixed in the next printing of the book too, of course.

If you want to get really tricky, you can have the <span> tag emulate the typical characteristics of an anchor tag too, so visitors get a visually consistent cue to click, by adding the following style attribute:

style="font-color:#00f;text-decoration:underline;cursor:pointer;"
Now if I could just exorcise all the gremlins in the book production process... :-)


Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Simpy.

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

Ironically Guru Dave your revised code still doesn't "seem" to work. I tried it in a few browsers (netscape 7, IE 6) and it mostly produced "document.getElementbyID is not a function" error. I'm a novice at javascript myself but to me the code looks right, but browser seems to be saying the that it cannot be used within the onclick like this? Calling the same thing through a function works fine for example...

Posted by: Joel at February 23, 2006 5:37 AM

Oh dear - as Joel points out, your code is still wrong. It should be

getElementById

not

getElementByID

Posted by: Robert at December 29, 2006 1:12 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!









Remember personal info?


Please note that I will never send you any unsolicited commercial email. Ever.

While I'm at it, please note that by submitting a question or comment you're agreeing to my terms of service, which are: you relinquish any subsequent rights of ownership to your material by submitting it on this site.









Uniblue: Free Virus Scan

Search
Find just the answers you seek from among our 1700+ free tech support articles by using our Lijit search engine.


Help!





Subscribe to
Ask Dave Taylor!

Add to Google Reader
Add to My Yahoo!
Subscribe in NewsGator Online

RDF   XML

Free Updates!
Sign up and get free weekly updates and special offers on books, seminars, workshops and more.


Recent Entries
Join the List!
Join my author info mailing list, where you'll learn about my upcoming books, speaking gigs, and more!


Book Links
© 2002 - 2008 by Dave Taylor. All Rights Reserved.

Note: This web site is for the purpose of disseminating information for educational purposes, free of charge, for the benefit of all visitors. We take great care to provide quality information. However, we do not guarantee, and accept no legal liability whatsoever arising from or connected to, the accuracy, reliability, currency or completeness of any material contained on this web site or on any linked site.

[whiteboard marker tray]