Ramblemuse Touch Points

I’ve now brought my more general bibliography to at least a temporary stable point. In essence, that means that I’ve included enough content to hopefully make it useful, without so much that it becomes cumbersome. I’ll let go of it for awhile and move my focus on to other endeavors.

Along the way of working out the technical details, I renewed my distaste for Internet Explorer 5.5-6 and could at least see some improvement with IE 7. Implementing the CSS drop down navigation menus with the former required the JavaScript augmentation described by Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones. The JavaScript isn’t used to create the menus, but to force a CSS class change to a “hover” class; something handled automatically by FireFox and IE 7. I’d already been using this methodology since the redesign of my home page last year. There was a new wrinkle, however, in the bibliography.

IE 5.5-6 has an interesting design “feature” relating to forms. In particular for the bibliography, a form select item will always be rendered on top, independent of the CSS z-index. The implication was that the menu would drop down over the top of a bibliography page, but that the category select window at the top of the page would bleed through the menu. Mike Hall provides an example of this bleed-through on BrainJar. My solution was to add to the behavior coding for the JavaScript class change for the menu hover. For IE 5.5-6.0, when the menu drops, the class for the form is changed to include “display:none” and that for a blank line is changed from “display:none”. The effect is to replace the form with a blank line of the same height, dodging the bleed-through error and avoiding a vertical “jitter”.

The final technical glitch with IE 5.5-6 (if one can ever say “final”), involved an image in an “iframe” at the bottom of the page. If I had this as

<iframe>…</iframe><p>text</p>,

the image would start to load then disappear, leaving the correct space blank. When I changed to

<p><iframe>…</iframe>text</p>,

everything displayed okay. Go figure.