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

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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