Our in-house web application framework has a grid "control" composed of two HTML tables, one for the header and one for the body, each inside its own DIV, with a wrapper DIV around the lot which controls the overall sizing and scrolling.
I started having painting problems after absolutely positioning the wrapper DIV using left, top, right and bottom. These problems did not occur with the wrapper DIV positioned using left, top, right and height. The problems were frequent but unpredictable. Sometimes the grid would refuse to paint, sometimes it would paint initially, but then disappear following certain operations within the grid.
However, I then found that if the grid was not properly painted, resizing the browser window would cause it to repaint correctly. So I tried resizing the window in script using window.resizeBy(0,1), which worked up to a point. However, it a pretty ugly hack because (a) it's visible to the user, and (b) it has the unfortunate side-effect of partially disconnecting the sizing of the frame from the window.
I went searching for a better workaround, and finally found this post by Kir Maximov. Bingo! If you simply add an empty CSS class to one of the inside DIVs, it triggers IE to re-render the element. I put a toggle in the script to add the empty class and remove it on alternate invocations of the script. Works like a dream!
Okay, it's not that good. I found that in some cases it would only work if I used setTimeout(). Presumably this causes the operation to be processed by a different thread .... who cares, as long as it bloody works! Joel has convinced me, let's forget our idealism.
I think what Joel was actually trying to say, was that coming down on one side or the other is no longer a helpful approach for anybody...
ReplyDeleteWe live in a world now that offers combinations of sites, apps, standards, quirks, browsers, legacy code, etc, etc... The typical flame war approach (ie, either coming down in favour of standards, or doing things "the old way, because it worked") presents two perspectives that are as broken as each other when it comes to building stuff for the modern internet - a complex environment that no standard can ever summarise, but is made clearer in some way by every standard that ever existed.
"We need to evolve," is what I think he was trying to say... "just as M$ needs to evolve, because having only 2 camps is hurting everyone, like it does in almost every arena except football."
My 2c :)