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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... :-)

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Reader Comments To Date: 5

Joel said, on February 23, 2006 5:37 AM:

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...

Robert said, on December 29, 2006 1:12 PM:

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

getElementById

not

getElementByID

levent toptas said, on July 30, 2010 8:34 AM:

this script not working wiht firefox.
please somebody help me.

thank u.


function layerGizle()
{
uz=document.all.length;
for (i=0;i';
document.all.item(i).style.color='';
}

}
}
}

function layerGizlex()
{

for (x in document.all) {
if (x.slice(0,6)=="MenuX_")
{
document.all.item(x).style.visibility='hidden';
}
if (x.slice(0,5)=="tdxc_")
{
document.all.item(x).style.backgroundColor='';
document.all.item(x).style.color='';
}
}
}

Javascript said, on February 21, 2011 5:32 PM:

Thanks! It helped me to understand the problem and I used getElementsByName() instead of getElementByID()

Thanks once again!

Kellie said, on March 31, 2013 8:46 PM:

Thanks for your help, I've been a bit stuck with the JavaScript errors on my own page, so this is much appreciated. Now to figure out some of the CSS problems...

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

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











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