Tricklin

I realize that I haven't written anything in a rather long time. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being the release of IE7, and the fact that 70% of the pages of my company's online application would not appear correctly when using it. This wouldn't be too big of a deal if Microsoft hadn't announced that IE7 will be part of an automatic update. Because of this, and the fact that an actual date was never stated, our web development team spent countless hours modifying our code on the pages that were having problems with IE7. You may be surprised to hear read this, but in a way, I have been able to see this as a good thing.

A Good Thing? You Must Be Out Of Your Mind!
Yeah, I know, spending 14 hours a day for the past 2 weeks re-writing html pages just so they work in one browser doesn't sound like "A Good Thing". After all, the entire application worked fine in Firefox, Opera, IE6, etc. How can I possibly say this is a good thing? Well, let me start off by saying that this application was originally created in 1998, and about 4 years later, was revamped a bit, but as far as a focus on well formed, standards compliant html code goes, this never surfaced as a concern for us. We created the pages to work, with little concern about the format of the code. So, all pages used tables for formatting, and would have failed a validation test miserably.

Read the rest of this entry »

They've changed things up a bit over at dictionary.com.

It looks slick, clean, and more user friendly. Best of all they are using CSS for layout. Because of this, it seems to generate pages much quicker than before. I'll have to give my props to the designers over at happycog.com, the ones responsible for the new layout and redesign of dictionary.com.

Below is a JavaScript that will make alternating the row colors of a table extremely simple. The beauty of it is that the script is only 16 lines long!

function alternateRowColor(tableid,lightclass,darkclass,overclass) {
    var tableid = document.getElementById(tableid);
    var rows = tableid.tBodies[0].rows;
    for(var ii = 0; ii < rows.length; ii++) {
        var row = rows[ii];
        if(ii % 2) {
             row.className = lightclass;              row.onmouseover = function () {overRow(this.id,overclass);};
             row.onmouseout = function () {overRow(this.id,lightclass);};
        } else {
         &nb sp;  row.className = darkclass;
         &nb sp;  row.onmouseover = function () {overRow(this.id,overclass);};
         &nb sp;  row.onmouseout = function () {overRow(this.id,darkclass);};
        }
    }
}

I've added a nice little row highlighting function to the mouseover and mouseout events called overRow(). This function only adds 3 lines of code:

function overRow(rowid, classname) {
    document.getElementById(rowid).clas sName = classname;
}

The last thing to do is make sure that the alternateRowColor() function gets invoked every time the page loads. Instead of having to place this in the body tag of all pages, all that is needed is one line of code added to the same script that will automatically run the function each time a page loads:

window.onload=function(){ alternateRowColor('alternateRows','light','dark','over');}

That's all there is to it. See it in action.