Comments on: “Fun” with Prototype and IE7 and Tables

By: Richard Glanvill

Richard Glanvill — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:14:07 +0000

If the output generated by prototype DOM builder (new Element) does not display as expected in IE, try changing the case of the attributes in.

example:
This:
var tbl = new Element(‘table’, { ‘cellspacing’ : 0 };

..should be:
var tbl = new Element(‘table’, { ‘cellSpacing’ : 0 };

By: Suneth Mendis

Suneth Mendis — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:34:11 +0000

You are spot on Michael. I ran into the same problem some time ago. The most annoying thing about Prototype or Scriptaculous Builder is that it does not show any error messages in the console.
So you are right. You got to use “className” (Case sensitive too) and not class if you are using the Scriptaculous Builder. Its always pays off to read the documentation!!! (http://github.com/madrobby/scriptaculous/wikis/builder)
Prototype also comes with a dynamic DOM builder function.

var container = new Element(‘div’, { ‘class’: class_name });
Note how Prototype use “class” and not className here.

By: Michael McLawhorn

Michael McLawhorn — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:32:12 +0000

I ran into a related issue, that the attribute ‘class’ which is visible in Firefox as something.class = ‘foo’, in IE7, that statement caused the entire javascript file it was in to fail to LOAD without a meaningful error message.

The fix was to call it .className. Which is fine. Except that I’m not even sure how I was supposed to find that out.

By: Suneth Mendis

Suneth Mendis — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:10:30 +0000

Actually it failed even with a border attribute. So having style: “border: 1px solid blue;” did not work… So I did not explore along that path any further… Just to save some time!

By: ddoctor

ddoctor — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:00:18 +0000

Also….

You’re setting the “background-color” attribute, using the “background” shorthand attribute. “background:blue;” is completely valid, because all of the individual attribute values on “background” are optional.

I just wonder: does IE like “background-color” better? I’m guessing “no”, but it might be worth a try…. or probably not if you’ve already solved the problem!

By: ddoctor

ddoctor — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:57:45 +0000

Lame, IE. Lame.

It “kinda” makes sense – document is already created – it doesn’t want to do any more parsing.

However, a lot of the flexibility of HTML is in that you can:
a) manipulate as objects
b) generate as text

And when (b) is gone, you really miss it… eg here, and in Java Swing.

When I first made an ajax table, I was really hoping I could do something like:
Builder.make(“blah)

… which was not to be. Which sux, because it conveys exactly the same amount of information as the nested Builder statement, it just hasn’t been parsed… oh, if only we had a HTML parser around… OH WAIT WE DO there’s a web browser right there!