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Friday, March 25, 2005
Good Friday. Liars.
What a mess web development is. What a waste of time it is too.
I have spent the better part of the morning wondering why, when I unhide a DIV and then click on the WYSIWYG editor, Mozilla throws a fatal error and refuses to play anymore. I went through all the logical checks, make sure I'm not trampling on any other defined names or namespaces (a good argument for OOP if there was ever one). I also removed and changed some event handlers to see if they were colliding - I even went all DOM and added document events to the AddEventHandler function to allow for cascading bubbling to no avail.
If I commented out: divobj.style.display=''; the WYSIWYG editor would work fine. Put the line back in, and *bang* Mozilla error. I had my hair cut yesterday so trying to pull it out was largely unsuccessful.
To make matters worse, NTL, my ISP decided to play "switch off all the proxy servers at random times" leaving me with no http access for minutes at a time which makes debugging that little bit harder.
Anyway, after much griping and moaning to anyone who would listen (AIM still worked) Rikki did a bit of Googling and returned an interesting fact. Apparently the error I was receiving was a common Gecko error when using "display:inline" as a CSS attribute for forms. Adding "display:block" as an inline style to the form fixed the problem and cleared up the error. Hooray for Google.
In more positive news, I've finished off the PM notification window and made it possible to cycle through all your new PMs - just for the hell of it.
I also captured another washed out and badly proportioned movie (don't blame me, blame the screen recorder) of the "name-suggest" box in use (this was the hidden DIV which caused so much frustration).
Movie (2.3mb MP4: Quicktime / Media Player 9+)
March 25, 2005 | Permalink
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Comments
Matt,
Your blog entries are like buses - you wait for days for one to arrive then you get loads all in one go. :D
Posted by: Martin | Mar 25, 2005 3:40:13 PM
True, especially if the buses are Stagecoach ones...
Posted by: Vladimir Lushnikov | Mar 25, 2005 3:59:09 PM
Matt and I have been crying about Javascript all day. I've finally given up on the bit of JS I was writing, since I spent 5 hours on a single line of code.
Posted by: Rikki | Mar 25, 2005 4:01:36 PM
it looks like google suggest
Posted by: John | Mar 25, 2005 4:11:15 PM
^_^ duh.. it was google suggest that made this technology get hyped.
I like the way this is going.. IPB seems to be getting a real edge above other forums now. (good thing you worked on the WYSIWYG editor for experience)
I'm really interested in what kind of features could become of this
Posted by: Bas | Mar 25, 2005 4:15:51 PM
I hate javascript. My DIV refuses to tell me its width when it did just fine two lines ago.
Posted by: Matt | Mar 25, 2005 4:47:10 PM
Dont use NTL :P
Posted by: Swords | Mar 25, 2005 6:40:00 PM
Matt, just curious, what editor are you using?
Posted by: rollercoaster375 | Mar 26, 2005 1:50:06 AM
Great work !!
Matt, one note:
It would be better if the "name-suggest" would just suggest usernames:
- from your Buddy/adress-list (I know it is not much used at the moment, but that would be a good reason to use it)
- and eventually if possible from people you have send or received a pm
because:
1) these are the more likely ones you are going to send a pm (in other cases you most often click on the PM button right under the the post of the user)
2) you'll find the desired username much faster as less usernames will appear and you won't have to scroll down so much if the board has thousands of users. Espacially you won't be everytime confused by similar names like martin7, martin78, martin1978, etcetera. It is much faster if you just have 3 names in your list beginning with "mar" than 40 beginning with "martin". It would mean that you would still have to write "martin7" and therefore the name-suggest won't be such a big help as it could have been.
It would be perfect if it would be possible to enter more than one username in the form by separating them with a comma. Therefore the carbon-copy box could be removed and replaced with a collapsable CC and BCC field.
This would be more comprehensible to a lot of users, because it is like all major email-applications are doing it.
Posted by: | Mar 26, 2005 12:59:52 PM
I second that suggestion!
Posted by: Martin | Mar 26, 2005 1:31:13 PM
Matt,
Are you using the Javascript Debugger and DOM Inspector in Moz? They're pretty much invaluable in working with JS code.
Posted by: Tim Dorr | Mar 27, 2005 7:39:58 AM
The JS debugger wasn't much use for this error, all it did was report the exception, no clue as to where to look.
It seems to be an error that affects all RTE scripts - out of a list of around 25 results, a lot of them were support pages for various RTE's. Luckily one of them provided a (rather bizarre) fix. I can't work out why the display style of a form tag would cause such an exception when a div is shown on the page o_O
Posted by: Rikki | Mar 27, 2005 12:15:45 PM
... and the FastReply could also be replaced with Ajax by loading only the WYSIWYG-editor right at the end of the page (also nicely done at Gmail).
Posted by: mike | Mar 29, 2005 2:15:53 PM
Would it be difficult to add some drag and drop features on the user side like the customisable Google News (http://news.google.com) to IP.dynamic ?
Posted by: mike | Apr 1, 2005 3:16:16 PM
Matt, i have now started checking your blog Regurally. And you Disapoint me by not posting any Entrys... :'(
Posted by: Swords | Apr 4, 2005 1:56:56 PM
Sorry.
I've had to focus on more pressing matters such as the Subscriptions manager semi-rewrite which has been much less interesting and not quite so much fun to blog about.
Posted by: Matt | Apr 4, 2005 4:43:20 PM
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