Had a little chat with Eddie Traversa over at dhtmlnirvana.com this morning and we got to talking about how some nice dom manipulation can give you Flash-like effects without the plugin. Or, in other words, how many people even notice the dhtml cross fading on pumpernickle.net I think most folks either just experience it without noticing it or assume it's a Flash effect...
Right about the same time, Andy sent me an email asking if the dom could be manipulated to render the "open" state of a select list. I said no, as the browser uses the os's widget library to draw it but he could probably hack something in dhtml. So I got curious and have just spent the last hour playing with a formatted html definition list
Why in the world would you want to complicate a page like this when the plain vanilla select statement does the job? Answers on a post-card — still, it looks nice (and works well in Lynx, of course)...
Comments (2)
Hi James, sorry to take so long to publish your comment. I think the email notification failed.
I totally agree with you. Ever since safari failed to render my site properly I just sort of stopped using it. I guess that's a little crazy given the number of mac users out there using the browser but I now only test in Firefox and IE.
Btw, please make sure your dhtml selects degrade nicely (of course)
Cheers,
Dug
Posted by Dug | October 24, 2006 3:17 PM
Posted on October 24, 2006 15:17
Quick reasons for DHTML selects:
1) SELECTs cannot be covered by DIVs in IE.
2) SELECTs cannot be styled.
3) Some browsers (*cough* Safari) like to hijack form element styles even for those that can be styled to some degree.
Posted by James Landis | October 22, 2006 2:48 AM
Posted on October 22, 2006 02:48